The Project Gutenberg eBook ofMed ServiceThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: Med ServiceAuthor: Murray LeinsterIllustrator: H. R. Van DongenRelease date: March 13, 2023 [eBook #70277]Most recently updated: May 9, 2023Language: EnglishOriginal publication: United States: Street & Smith Publications, Inc, 1957Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MED SERVICE ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: Med ServiceAuthor: Murray LeinsterIllustrator: H. R. Van DongenRelease date: March 13, 2023 [eBook #70277]Most recently updated: May 9, 2023Language: EnglishOriginal publication: United States: Street & Smith Publications, Inc, 1957Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
Title: Med Service
Author: Murray LeinsterIllustrator: H. R. Van Dongen
Author: Murray Leinster
Illustrator: H. R. Van Dongen
Release date: March 13, 2023 [eBook #70277]Most recently updated: May 9, 2023
Language: English
Original publication: United States: Street & Smith Publications, Inc, 1957
Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MED SERVICE ***
MED SERVICEBY MURRAY LEINSTERIllustrated by van Dongen[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced fromAstounding Science Fiction August 1957.Extensive research did not uncover any evidence thatthe U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Illustrated by van Dongen
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced fromAstounding Science Fiction August 1957.Extensive research did not uncover any evidence thatthe U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
I
"The probability of unfavorable consequences cannot be zero in any action of common life, but the probability increases by a very high power as a series of actions is lengthened. The effect of moral considerations, in conduct, may be stated to be a mathematically verifiable reduction in the number of unfavorable possible chance happenings. Of course, whether this process is termed the intelligent use of probability, or ethics, or piety, makes no difference in the fact. It is the method by which unfavorable chance happenings are made least probable. Arbitrary actions such as we call criminal cannot ever be justified by mathematics. For example ..."Probability and Human ConductFitzgerald
"The probability of unfavorable consequences cannot be zero in any action of common life, but the probability increases by a very high power as a series of actions is lengthened. The effect of moral considerations, in conduct, may be stated to be a mathematically verifiable reduction in the number of unfavorable possible chance happenings. Of course, whether this process is termed the intelligent use of probability, or ethics, or piety, makes no difference in the fact. It is the method by which unfavorable chance happenings are made least probable. Arbitrary actions such as we call criminal cannot ever be justified by mathematics. For example ..."
Probability and Human ConductFitzgerald
Calhoun lay in his bunk and read Fitzgerald on "Probability and Human Conduct" as the little Med Ship floated in overdrive. In overdrive travel there is nothing to do but pass the time away. Murgatroyd, thetormal, slept curled up in a ball in one corner of the small ship's cabin. His tail was meticulously curled about his nose. The ship's lights burned steadily. There were those small random noises which have to be provided to keep a man sane in the dead stillness of a ship traveling at thirty times the speed of light. Calhoun turned a page and yawned.
Something stirred somewhere. There was a click, and a taped voice said:
"When the tone sounds, break-out will be five seconds off."
A metronomic ticking, grave and deliberate, resounded in the stillness. Calhoun heaved himself up from the bunk and marked his place in the book. He moved to and seated himself in the control chair and fastened the safety belt. He said:
"Murgatroyd! Hark, hark the lark in Heaven's something-or-other doth sing. Wake up and comb your whiskers. We're getting there."
Murgatroyd opened one eye and saw Calhoun in the pilot's chair. He uncurled himself and padded to a place where there was something to grab hold of. He regarded Calhoun with bright eyes.
"BONG!" said the tape. It counted down. "Five—four—three—two—one—"
It stopped. The ship popped out of overdrive. The sensation was unmistakable. Calhoun's stomach seemed to turn over twice, and he had a sickish feeling of spiraling dizzily in what was somehow a cone. He swallowed. Murgatroyd made gulping noises. Outside, everything changed.
The sun Maris blazed silently in emptiness off to port. The Cetis star-cluster was astern, and the light by which it could be seen had traveled for many years to reach here, though Calhoun had left Med Headquarters only three weeks before. The third planet of Maris swung splendidly in its orbit. Calhoun checked, and nodded in satisfaction. He spoke over his shoulder to Murgatroyd.
"We're here, all right."
"Chee!" shrilled Murgatroyd.
He uncoiled his tail from about a cabinet-handle and hopped up to look at the vision-screen. What he saw, of course, meant nothing to him. But alltormalsimitate the actions of human beings, as parrots imitate their speech. He blinked wisely at the screen and turned his eyes to Calhoun.
"It's Maris III," Calhoun told him, "and pretty close. It's a colony of Dettra Two. One city was reported started two Earth-years ago. It should just about be colonized now."
"Chee-chee!" shrilled Murgatroyd.
"So get out of the way," commanded Calhoun. "We'll make our approach and I'll tell 'em we're here."
He made a standard approach on interplanetary drive. Naturally, it was a long process. But after some hours he flipped over the call-switch and made the usual identification and landing request.
"Med ShipAesclipus Twentyto ground," he said into the transmitter. "Requesting co-ordinates for landing. Our mass is fifty tons. Repeat, five-oh tons. Purpose of landing, planetary health inspection."
He relaxed. This job ought to be purest routine. There was a landing grid in the spaceport city on Maris III. From its control room instructions should be sent, indicating a position some five planetary diameters or farther out from the surface of that world. Calhoun's little ship should repair to that spot. The giant landing grid should then reach out its specialized force-field and lock onto the ship, and then bring it gently but irresistibly down to ground. Then Calhoun, representing Med Service, should confer gravely with planetary authorities about public health conditions on Maris III.
It was not to be expected that anything important would turn up. Calhoun would deliver full details of recent advances in the progress of medicine. These might already have reached Maris III in the ordinary course of commerce, but he would make sure. He might—but it was unlikely—learn of some novelty worked out here. In any case, within three days he should return to the small Med Ship, the landing grid should heave it firmly heavenward to not less than five planetary diameters distance, and there release it. And Calhoun and Murgatroyd and the Med Ship should flick into overdrive and speed back toward Headquarters, from whence they had come.
Right now, Calhoun waited for an answer to his landing call. But he regarded the vast disk of the nearby planet.
"By the map," he observed to Murgatroyd, "the city ought to be on the shore of that bay somewhere near the terminus. Close to the sunset line."
His call was answered. A voice said incredulously on the space-phone speaker:
"What? What's that? What's that you say?"
"Med ShipAesclipus Twenty," Calhoun repeated patiently. "Requesting co-ordinates for landing. Our mass is fifty tons. Repeat, five-oh tons. Purpose of landing, planetary health inspection."
The voice said more incredulously still:
"A Med Ship? Holy—" By the change of sound, the man down on the planet had turned away from the microphone. "Hey! Listen to this—"
There was abrupt silence. Calhoun raised his eyebrows. He drummed on the control desk before him.
There was a long pause. A very long pause. Then a new voice came on the space phone, up from the ground:
"You up aloft there! Identify yourself!"
Calhoun said very politely:
"This is Med ShipAesclipus Twenty. I would like to come to ground. Purpose of landing, health inspection."
"Wait," said the voice from the planet. It sounded strained.
A murmuring sounded, transmitted from fifty thousand miles away. Then there was a click. The transmitter down below had cut off. Calhoun raised his eyebrows again. This was not according to routine. Not at all! The Med Service was badly overworked and understaffed. The resources of interplanetary services were always apt to be stretched to their utmost, because there could be no galactic government as such. Some thousands of occupied planets, the closest of them light-years apart—or weeks of traveling—couldn't hold elections or have political parties for the simple reason that travel even in overdrive was too slow. They could only have service organizations whose authority depended on the consent of the people served, and whose support had to be gathered when and as it was possible.
But the Med Service was admittedly important. The local Sector Headquarters was in the Cetis cluster. It was a sort of interstellar clinic, with additions. It gathered and disseminated the results of experience in health and medicine among some thousands of colony-worlds, and from time to time it made contact with other Headquarters carrying on the same work elsewhere. It admittedly took fifty years for a new technique in gene-selection to cross the so-far-occupied part of the galaxy, but it was a three-year voyage in overdrive to cover the same distance direct. And the Med Service was worth while. There was no problem of human ecological adjustment it had so far been unable to solve, and there were some dozens of planets whose human colonies owed their existence to it. There was nowhere—nowhere at all—that a Med Ship was not welcomed on its errand from Headquarters.
"Aground there!" said Calhoun sharply. "What's the matter? Are you landing me or not?"
There was no answer. Then, suddenly, every sound-producing device in the ship abruptly emitted a hoarse and monstrous noise. The lights flashed up and circuit-breakers cut them off. The nearby-object horn squawked. The hull-temperature warning squealed. The ship's internal gravity-field tugged horribly for an instant and went off. Every device within the ship designed to notify emergency clanged or shrieked or roared or screamed. There was a momentary bedlam.
It lasted for part of a second only. Then everything stopped. There was no weight within the ship, and there were no lights, and there was dead silence, and Murgatroyd made whimpering sounds in the darkness.
Calhoun thought absurdly to himself, "According to the book, this is an unfavorable chance consequence of something or other." But it was more than an unfavorable chance occurrence. It was an intentional and drastic and possibly a deadly one.
"Somebody's acting up," said Calhoun measuredly, in the blackness. "What's the matter with them?"
He flipped the screen switch to bring back vision of what was outside. The vision screens of a ship are very carefully fused against over-load burnouts, because there is nothing in all the cosmos quite as helpless and foredoomed as a ship which is blind in the emptiness of space. But the screens did not light again. They couldn't. The cutouts hadn't worked in time.
Calhoun's scalp crawled. But as his eyes adjusted, he saw the palely fluorescent handles of switches and doors. They hadn't been made fluorescent in expectation of an emergency like this, of course, but they would help a great deal. He knew what had happened. It couldn't be but one thing—a landing-grid field clamped on the fifty-ton Med Ship with the power needed to grasp and land a twenty-thousand-ton liner. At that strength it would paralyze every instrument and blow every cut-off. It could not be accident. The reception of the news of his identity, the repeated request that he identify himself, and then the demand that he wait—This murderous performance was deliberate.
"Maybe," said Calhoun in the inky-black cabin, "as a Med Ship our arrival is an unfavorable chance consequence of something—or the unfavorableness is—and somebody means to keep us from happening. It looks like it."
Murgatroyd whimpered.
"And I think," added Calhoun coldly, "that somebody may need a swift kick in the negative feedback!"
He released himself from the safety belt and dived across the cabin in which there was now no weight at all. In the blackness he opened a cabinet door. What he did inside was customarily done by a man wearing thick insulating gloves, in the landing grid back at Headquarters. He threw certain switches which would allow the discharge of the power-storage cells which worked the Med Ship's overdrive. Monstrous quantities of energy were required to put even a fifty-ton ship into overdrive, and monstrous amounts were returned when it came out. The power amounted to ounces of pure, raw energy, and as a safety-precaution such amounts were normally put into the Duhanne cells only just before a Med Ship's launching, and drained out again on its return. But now, Calhoun threw switches which made a rather incredible amount of power available for dumping into the landing-grid field about him—if necessary.
He floated back to the control chair.
The ship lurched—violently. It was being moved by the grid field without any gentleness at all. Calhoun's hands barely grasped the back of his pilot's chair before the jerk came, and it almost tore them free. He just missed being flung against the back wall of the cabin by the applied acceleration. But he was a long way out from the planet. He was at the end of a lever fifty thousand miles long. For that lever to be used to shake him too brutally would require special adjustments. But somebody was making them. The jerk reversed directions. He was flung savagely against the chair to which he'd been clinging. He struggled. Another yank, in another direction. Another one still. It flung him violently into the chair.
Behind him, Murgatroyd squealed angrily as he went hurtling across the cabin. He grabbed for holding-places with all four paws and his tail.
Another shake. Calhoun had barely clipped the safety belt fast before a furious jolt nearly flung him out of it again to crash against the cabin ceiling. Yet another vicious surge of acceleration. He scrabbled for the controls. The yanks and plungings of the ship increased intolerably. He was nauseated. Once he was thrust so furiously into the control chair that he was on the verge of blacking out, and then the direction of thrust was changed to the exact opposite so that the blood rushing to his head seemed about to explode it. His arms flailed out of control. He became dazed. But when his hands were flung against the control board, despite their bruising he tried to cling to the control knobs, and each time he threw them over. Practically all his circuits were blown, but there was one—
His numbing fingers threw it. There was a roar, so fierce that it seemed an explosion. He'd reached the switch which made effective the discharge-circuit of his Duhanne cells. He'd thrown it. It was designed to let the little ship's overdrive power-reserve flow into storage at Headquarters on return from duty. Now, though, it poured into the landing-grid field outside. It amounted to hundreds of millions of kilowatt hours, delivered in the fraction of a second. There was the smell of ozone. The sound was like a thunder clap.
But abruptly there was a strange and incredible peace. The lights came on waveringly as his shaking fingers restored the circuit-breakers. Murgatroyd shrilled indignantly, clinging desperately to an instrument rack. But the vision screens did not light again. Calhoun swore. Swiftly, he threw more circuit-restorers. The nearest-object indicator told of the presence of Maris III at forty-odd thousand miles. The hull-temperature indicator was up some fifty-six degrees. The internal-gravity field came on, faintly, and then built up to normal. But the screens would not light. They were permanently dead. Calhoun raged for seconds. Then he got hold of himself.
"Chee-chee-chee!" chattered Murgatroyd desperately. "Chee-chee!"
"Shut up!" growled Calhoun. "Some bright lad aground thought up a new way to commit murder. Damned near got away with it, too! He figured he'd shake us to death like a dog does a rat, only he was using a landing-grid field to do it with! Right now, I hope I fried him!"
But it was not likely. Such quantities of power as are used to handle twenty-thousand-ton space liners are not controlled direct, but by relays. The power Calhoun had flung into the grid field should have blown out the grid's transformers with a spectacular display of fireworks, but it was hardly probable it had gotten back to the individual at the controls.
"But I suspect," observed Calhoun vengefully, "that he'll consider this business an unfavorable occurrence! Somebody'll twist his tail, too, either for trying what he did or for not getting away with it! Only, as a matter of pure precaution—"
His expression changed suddenly. He'd been trying not to think of the consequences of having no sight of the cosmos outside the ship. Now he remembered the electron telescope. It had not been in circuit, so it could not have been burned out like his vision screens. He switched it on. A star field appeared over his head.
"Chee-chee!" cried Murgatroyd hysterically.
Calhoun glanced at him. The jerking of the ship had shifted the instruments in the rack to which Murgatroyd clung. Clipped into place though they were, they'd caught Murgatroyd's tail and pinched it tightly.
"You'll have to wait," snapped Calhoun. "Right now I've got to make us look like a successful accident. Otherwise whoever tried to spread us all over the cabin walls will try something else!"
The Med Ship flung through space in whatever direction and at whatever velocity it had possessed when the grid field blew. Calhoun shifted the electron-telescope field and simultaneously threw on the emergency-rocket controls. There was a growling of the pencil-thin, high-velocity blasts. There was a surging of the ship.
"No straight-line stuff," Calhoun reminded himself.
He swung the ship into a dizzy spiral, as if innumerable things had been torn or battered loose in the ship and its rockets had come on of themselves. Painstakingly, he jettisoned in one explosive burst all the stored waste of his journey which could not be disposed of while in overdrive. To any space-scanning instrument on the ground, it would look like something detonating violently inside the ship.
"Now—"
The planet Maris III swung across the electron telescope's field. It looked hideously near—but that was the telescope's magnification. Yet Calhoun sweated. He looked at the nearest-object dial for reassurance. The planet was nearer by a thousand miles.
"Hah!" said Calhoun.
He changed the ship's spiral course. He changed it again. He abruptly reversed the direction of its turn. Adequate training in space-combat might have helped plot an evasion-course, but it might have been recognizable. Nobody could anticipate his maneuvers now, though. He adjusted the telescope next time the planet swept across its field, and flipped on the photorecorder. Then he pulled out of the spiral, whirled the ship until the city was covered by the telescope, and ran the recorder as long as he dared keep a straight course. Then he swooped toward the planet in a crazy, twisting fall with erratic intermissions, and made a final lunatic dash almost parallel to the planet's surface.
At five hundred miles, he unshielded the ports which of necessity had to be kept covered in clear space. There was a sky which was vividly bright with stars. There was a vast blackness off to starboard which was the night side of the planet.
He went down. At four hundred miles the outside pressure indicator wavered away from its pin. He used it like a pitot-tube recording, doing sums in his head to figure the static pressure that should exist at this height, to compare with the dynamic pressure produced by his velocity through the near hard vacuum. The pressure should have been substantially zero. He swung the ship end-for-end and killed velocity to bring the pressure-indication down. The ship descended. Two hundred miles. He saw the thin bright line of sunshine at the limb of the planet. Down to one hundred. He cut the rockets and let the ship fall silently, swinging it nose up.
At ten miles he listened for man-made radiation. There was nothing in the electromagnetic spectrum but the crackling of static in an electric storm which might be a thousand miles away. At five miles height the nearest-object indicator, near the bottom of its scale, wavered in a fashion to prove that he was still moving laterally across mountainous country. He swung the ship and killed that velocity, too.
At two miles he used the rockets for deceleration. The pencil-thin flame reached down for an incredible distance. By naked-eye observation out a port he tilted the fiercely-roaring, swiftly-falling ship until hillsides and forests underneath him ceased to move. By that time he was very low indeed.
He reached ground on a mountainside which was lighted by the blue-white flame of the rocket-blast. He chose an area in which the tree tops were almost flat, indicating something like a plateau underneath. Murgatroyd was practically frantic by this time because of his capture and the pinching of his tail, but Calhoun could not spare time to release him. He let the ship down gently, gently, trying to descend in an absolutely vertical line.
If he didn't do it perfectly, he came very close. The ship settled into what was practically a burned-away tunnel among monstrous trees. The high-velocity slender flame did not splash when it reached ground. It penetrated. It burned a hole for itself through humus and clay and bedrock. When the ship touched and settled, there was boiling molten stone some sixty feet underground, but there was a small scratching sound as it came to rest. A flame-amputated tree-limb rubbed tentatively against the hull.
Calhoun turned off the rockets. The ship swayed slightly and there were crunching noises. Then it was still on its landing fins.
"Now," said Calhoun, "I can take care of you, Murgatroyd."
He flicked on the switches of the exterior microphones—much more sensitive than human ears. The radiation-detectors were still in action. They reported only the cracklings of the distant storm.
But the microphones brought in the moaning of wind over nearby mountaintops, and the almost deafening susurrus of rustling leaves. Underneath these noises there was a bedlam of other natural sounds. There were chirpings and hootings and squeaks, and the gruntings made by native animal life. These sounds had a singularly peaceful quality. When Calhoun toned them down to be no more than background-noises, they suggested the sort of concert of night-creatures which to men has always seemed an indication of purest tranquility.
Presently Calhoun looked at the pictures the photorecorder had taken while the telescope's field swept over the city. It was the colony-city reported to have been begun two years before, to receive colonists from Dettra Two. It was the city of the landing grid which had tried to destroy the Med Ship as a dog kills a rat—by shaking it to fragments, some fifty thousand miles in space. It was the city which had made Calhoun land with his vision-plates blinded, that had made him pretend his ship was internally a wreck: which had drained his power-reserves of some hundreds of millions of kilowatt hours of energy. It was the city which had made his return to Med Headquarters impossible.
He inspected the telescopic pictures. They were very clear. They showed the city with astonishing detail. There was a lacy pattern of highways, with their medallions of multiple-dwelling units. There were the lavish park areas between the buildings of this planetary capital. There was the landing grid itself—a half-mile-high structure of steel girders, a full mile in diameter.
But there were no vehicles on the highways. There were no specks on the crossing bridges to indicate people on foot. There were no copters on the building roofs, nor were there objects in mid-air to tell of air traffic.
The city was either deserted or it had never been occupied. But it was absolutely intact. The structures were perfect. There was no indication of past panic or disaster, and even the highways had not been overgrown by vegetation. But it was empty—or else it was dead.
But somebody in it had tried very ferociously and with singular effectiveness to try to destroy the Med Ship.
Because it was a Med Ship.
Calhoun raised his eyebrows and looked at Murgatroyd.
"Why is all this?" he asked. "Have you any ideas?"
"Chee!" shrilled Murgatroyd.
II
"The purpose of a contemplated human action is always the attainment of a desired subjective experience. But a subjective experience is desired both in terms of intensity, and in terms of duration. For an individual the temptingness of different degrees of intensity-of-experience is readily computed. However, the temptingness of different durations is equally necessary for the computation of the probability of a given individual performing a given action. This modification of desirability by expectable duration depends on the individual's time-sense: its acuity and its accuracy. Measurements of time-sense—"Probability and Human ConductFitzgerald
"The purpose of a contemplated human action is always the attainment of a desired subjective experience. But a subjective experience is desired both in terms of intensity, and in terms of duration. For an individual the temptingness of different degrees of intensity-of-experience is readily computed. However, the temptingness of different durations is equally necessary for the computation of the probability of a given individual performing a given action. This modification of desirability by expectable duration depends on the individual's time-sense: its acuity and its accuracy. Measurements of time-sense—"
Probability and Human ConductFitzgerald
Two days later Calhoun found a cultivated field and a dead man, but before that he found only bewilderment. Before leaving the Med Ship, he very carefully monitored all over again the entire radiation spectrum for man-made signals. There were no communications in the air of Maris III—which on the face of it was proof that the planet was uninhabited. But the ship's external microphones picked up a rocket roar in mid-morning of the day after Calhoun's landing. By the time the sound reached the ground, of course, the rocket itself was far below the horizon; but Calhoun saw the faint white trail of its passage against the blue of the sky. The fact that he saw it, in daytime, was proof that it was within the atmosphere. Which, in turn, said that the rocket was taking photographs from high altitude for signs of the crater the Med Ship should have made in an uncontrolled landing.
The fact of search proved that the planet was inhabited, and the silence of the radio spectrum said that it wasn't. The absence of traffic in the city said that it was dead or empty, but there were people there because they'd answered Calhoun's hail, and tried to kill him when he identified himself. But nobody would want to destroy a Med Ship except to prevent a health inspection, and nobody would want to prevent an inspection unless there was a situation aground that the Med Service ought to know about. But there should not possibly be such a situation.
There was no logical explanation for such a series of contradictions. Civilized men acted this way or that. There could only be civilized men here. They acted neither this way nor that. Therefore—the confusion began all over again.
Calhoun dictated an account of events to date into the emergency responder in the ship. If a search-call came from space, the responder would broadcast this data and Calhoun's intended action. He carefully shut off all other operating circuits so the ship couldn't be found by their radiation. He equipped himself for travel, and he and Murgatroyd left the ship. Obviously, he headed toward the city where whatever was wrong was centered.
Travel on foot was unaccustomed, but not difficult. The vegetation was semi-familiar. Maris III was an Earth-type planet and circled a Sol-type sun, and given similar conditions of gravity, air, sunlight, and temperature-range, similar organisms should develop. There would be room, for example, for low-growing ground-cover plants and there would also be advantages to height. There would be some equivalent of grasses, and there would be the equivalent of trees, with intermediate forms having in-between habits of growth. Similar reasoning would apply to animal life. There would be parallel ecological niches for animals to fill, and animals would adapt to fill them.
Maris III was not, then, an "unearthly" environment. It was much more like an unfamiliar part of a known planet than a new world altogether. But there were some oddities. An herbivorous creature without legs which squirmed like a snake. It lived in holes. A pigeon-sized creature whose wings were modified, gossamer-thin scales with iridescent colorings. There were creatures which seemed to live in lunatic association, and Calhoun was irritably curious to know if they were really symbiotes or only unrecognizable forms of the same organism, like the terrestrial male and female firefly-glowworm.
But he was heading for the city. He couldn't spare time to biologize. On his first day's journey he looked for food to save the rations he carried. Murgatroyd was handy, here. The littletormalhad his place in human society. He was friendly, and he was passionately imitative of human beings, and he had a definite psychology of his own. But he was useful, too. When Calhoun strode through the forests which had such curiously un-leaflike foliage, Murgatroyd strode grandly with him, imitating his walk. From time to time he dropped to all four paws to investigate something. He invariably caught up with Calhoun within seconds.
Once Calhoun saw him interestedly bite a tiny bit out of a most unpromising looking shrub-stalk. He savored its flavor, and then swallowed it. Calhoun took note of the plant and cut off a section. He bound it to the skin of his arm up near the elbow. Hours later there was no allergic reaction, so he tasted it. It was almost familiar. It had the flavor of a bracken-shoot, mingled with a fruity taste. It would be a green bulk-food like spinach or asparagus, filling but without much substance.
Later, Murgatroyd carefully examined a luscious-seeming fruit which grew low enough for him to pluck. He sniffed it closely and drew back. Calhoun noted that plant, too. Murgatroyd's tribe was bred at Headquarters for some highly valuable qualities. One was a very sensitive stomach—but it was only one. Murgatroyd's metabolism was very close to man's. If he ate something and it didn't disagree with him, it was very likely safe for a man to eat it, too. If he rejected something, it probably wasn't. But his real value was much more important than the tasting of questionable foods.
When Calhoun camped the first night, he made a fire of a plant shaped like a cactus-barrel and permeated with oil. By heaping dirt around it, he confined its burning to a round space very much like the direct-heat element of an electronic stove. It was an odd illustration of the fact that human progress does not involve anything really new in kind, but only increased convenience and availability of highly primitive comforts. By the light of that circular bonfire, Calhoun actually read a little. But the light was inadequate. Presently he yawned. One did not get very far in the Med Service without knowing probability in human conduct. It enabled one to check on the accuracy of statements made, whether by patients or officials, to a Med Ship man. Today, though, he'd traveled a long way on foot. He glanced at Murgatroyd, who was gravely pretending to read from a singularly straight-edged leaf.
"Murgatroyd," said Calhoun, "it is likely that you will interpret any strange sound as a possible undesirable subjective experience. Which is to say, as dangerous. So if you hear anything sizable coming close during the night, I hope you'll squeal. Thank you."
Murgatroyd said "Chee," and Calhoun rolled over and went to sleep.
It was mid-morning of the next day when he came upon a cultivated field. It had been cleared and planted, of course, in preparation for the colonists who'd been expected to occupy the city. Familiar Earth-plants grew in it, ten feet high and more. And Calhoun examined it carefully, in the hope of finding how long since it had received attention. In his examination, he found the dead man.
As a corpse, the man was brand-new, and Calhoun very carefully put himself into a strictly medical frame of mind before he bent over for a technical estimate of what had happened, and when. The dead man seemed to have died of hunger. He was terribly emaciated, and he didn't belong in a cultivated field far from the city. By his garments he was a city-dweller and a prosperous one. He wore the jewels which nowadays indicated a man's profession and status in it much more than the value of his possessions. There was money in his pockets, and writing materials, a wallet with pictures and identification, and the normal oddments a man would carry. He'd been a civil servant. And he shouldn't have died of starvation.
He especially shouldn't have gone hungry here! The sweet-maize plants were tall and green. Their ears were ripe. He hadn't gone hungry! There were the inedible remains of at least two dozen sweet-maize ears. They had been eaten some time—some days—ago, and one had been left unfinished. If the dead man had eaten them but was unable to digest them, his belly should have been swollen with undigested food. It wasn't. He'd eaten and digested and still had died, at least largely of inanition.
Calhoun scowled.
"How about this corn, Murgatroyd?" he demanded.
He reached up and broke off a half-yard-long ear. He stripped away the protecting, stringy leaves. The soft grains underneath looked appetizing. They smelled like good fresh food. Calhoun offered the ear to Murgatroyd.
The littletormaltook it in his paws and on the instant was eating it with gusto.
"If you keep it down, he didn't die of eating it," said Calhoun, frowning, "and if he ate it—which he did—he didn't die of starvation. Which he did."
He waited. Murgatroyd consumed every grain upon the oversized cob. His furry belly distended a little. Calhoun offered him a second ear. He set to work on that, too, with self-evident enjoyment.
"In all history," said Calhoun, "nobody's ever been able to poison one of youtormalsbecause your digestive system has a qualitative-analysis unit in it that yells bloody murder if anything's likely to disagree with you. As a probability oftormalreaction, you'd have been nauseated before now if that stuff wasn't good to eat."
But Murgatroyd ate until he was distinctly pot-bellied. He left a few grains on the second ear with obvious regret. He put it down carefully on the ground. He shifted his left-hand whiskers with his paw and elaborately licked them clean. He did the same to the whiskers on the right-hand side of his mouth. He said comfortably:
"Chee!"
"Then that's that," Calhoun told him. "This man didn't die of starvation. I'm getting queasy!"
He had his lab kit in his shoulder-pack, of course. It was an absurdly small outfit, with almost microscopic instruments. But in Med Ship field work the techniques of microanalysis were standard. Distastefully, Calhoun took the tiny tissue-sample from which he could gather necessary information. Standing, he ran through the analytic process that seemed called for. When he finished, he buried the dead man as well as he could and started off in the direction of the city again. He scowled as he walked.
He journeyed for nearly half an hour before he spoke. Murgatroyd accompanied him on all fours, now, because of his heavy meal. After a mile and a half, Calhoun stopped and said grimly:
"Let's check you over, Murgatroyd."
He verified thetormal'spulse and respiration and temperature. He put a tiny breath-sample through the part of the lab kit which read off a basic metabolism rate. The small animal was quite accustomed to the process. He submitted blandly. The result of the checkover was that Murgatroyd thetormalwas perfectly normal.
"But," said Calhoun angrily, "that man died of starvation! There was practically no fat in that tissue-sample at all! He arrived where we found him while he was strong enough to eat, and he stayed where there was good food, and he ate it, and he digested it, and he died of starvation! Why?"
Murgatroyd wriggled unhappily, because Calhoun's tone was accusing. He said, "Chee!" in a subdued tone of voice. He looked pleadingly up at Calhoun.
"I'm not angry with you," Calhoun told him, "but dammit—"
He packed the lab kit back into his pack, which contained food for the two of them for about a week.
"Come along!" he said bitterly. He started off. Ten minutes later he stopped. "What I said was impossible. But it happened, so it mustn't have been what I said. I must have stated it wrongly. He could eat, because he did. He did eat, because of the cobs left. He did digest it. So why did he die of starvation? Did he stop eating?"
"Chee!" said Murgatroyd, with conviction.
Calhoun grunted and marched on once more. The man had not died of a disease—not directly. The tissue analysis gave a picture of death which denied that it came of any organ ceasing to function. Was it the failure of the organism—the man—to take the action required for living? Had he stopped eating?
Calhoun's mind skirted the notion warily. It was not plausible. The man had been able to feed himself and had done so. Anything which came upon him and made him unable to feed himself—
"He was a city man," growled Calhoun. "And this is a long way from the city. What was he doing away out here, anyhow?"
He hesitated and tramped on again. A city man found starved in a remote place might have become lost, somehow. But if this man was lost, he was assuredly not without food.
"If there was a ground-car," Calhoun considered, "it wouldn't mean anything. If he dared go back to the city he might have used it, but he wouldn't have been where I found him if he hadn't wanted or needed to leave the city. Hm-m-m—He walked out into the middle of the field. He was hungry—why didn't he have food?—and he ate. He stayed there for days, judging by the amount of food he ateanddigested. Why did he do that? Then he stopped eating and died. Again why?"
He crossed over the top of a rounded hillock some three miles from the shallow grave he'd made. He began to accept the idea that the dead man had stopped eating, for some reason, as the only possible explanation. But that didn't make it plausible. He saw another ridge of higher hills ahead.
In another hour he came to the crest of that farther range. It was the worn-down remnant of a very ancient mountain-range, now eroded to a mere fifteen hundred or two thousand feet. He stopped at the very top. Here was a time and place to look and take note of what he saw. The ground stretched away in gently rolling fashion for very many miles, and there was the blue blink of sea at the horizon. A little to the left he saw shining white. He grunted.
That was the city of Maris III, which had been built to receive colonists from Dettra and relieve the population-pressure there. It had been planned as the nucleus of a splendid, spacious, civilized world-nation to be added to the number of human-occupied worlds. From its beginning it should hold a population in the hundreds of thousands. It was surrounded by cultivated fields, and the air above it should be a-shimmer with flying things belonging to its inhabitants.
Calhoun stared at it through his binoculars. They could not make an image, even so near, to compare to that the electron telescope had made from space, but he could see much. The city was perfect. It was intact. It was new. But there was no sign of occupancy anywhere in it. It did not look dead, so much as frozen. There were no fliers above it. There was no motion on the highways. He saw one straight road which ran directly away along his line of sight. Had there been vehicles on it, he would have seen at least shifting patches of color as clots of traffic moved together. There were none.
He pressed his lips together. He began to inspect the nearer terrain. He saw foreshortened areas where square miles of ground had been cleared and planted to Earth vegetation. The ground would have been bulldozed clean, and then great sterilizers would have lumbered back and forth, killing every native seed and root and even the native soil-bacteria. Then there would have been spraying with cultures of the nitrogen-fixing and phosphorous-releasing microscopic organisms which normally lived in symbiosis with Earth-plants. They would have been tested beforehand for their ability to compete with indigenous bacterial life. And then Earth-plants would have been seeded.
They had been. Calhoun saw that inimitable green which a man somehow always recognizes. It is the green of plants whose ancestors throve on Earth and have followed that old planet's children halfway across the galaxy.
"The population must be practically nothing," growled Calhoun, "because it doesn't show. But the part of it in the city wants to keep whatever's happened from the Med Service. Hm-m-m. They're not dying, or they'd want help. But at least one dead man wasn't in the city where he belonged, and he could have used some help! Maybe there are more like him."
Murgatroyd said,
"Chee!"
"If there are two kinds of people here," added Calhoun darkly, "they might be—antagonistic to each other."
He stared with knitted brows over the vast expanse toward the horizon. Murgatroyd had halted a little behind him. He stood up on his hind legs and stared intently off to one side. He shaded his eyes with a forepaw in a singularly humanlike fashion and looked inquisitively at something he saw. But Calhoun did not notice.
"Make a guess, Murgatroyd," said Calhoun. "There are at least a few people in the city who don't want something known to the Med Service. So whatever's the matter, it's not fatal to them. There may be people wandering about like that poor devil we found. Something was fatal to him! Where'd we find more of his type? Since they haven't tried to kill me, we might make friends."
Murgatroyd did not answer. He stared absorbedly at a patch of underbrush some fifty yards to the left.
Calhoun shrugged and started down the hillside. Murgatroyd remained fixed in a pose of intensely curious attention to the patch of brush. Calhoun went on down the farther hillside. His back was toward the brush-thicket.
There was a deep-toned, musical twanging sound from the thicket. Calhoun's body jerked violently as an impact sounded. He stumbled and went down, with the shaft of a wooden projectile sticking out of his pack. He lay still.
Murgatroyd whimpered. He rushed to where Calhoun lay upon the ground. He danced in agitation, chattering shrilly. He wrung his paws in humanlike distress. He whimpered and chattered together. He tugged at Calhoun. Calhoun made no response.
A figure came out of the thicket. It was gaunt and thin, yet its garments had once been of admirable quality. It carried a strange and utterly primitive weapon. It moved toward Calhoun without lightness, but with a dreary resolution.
It bent over him and laid a hand to the wooden projectile it had fired into his back.
Calhoun moved suddenly. He grappled. The gaunt figure toppled, and he swarmed upon it savagely as it struggled. But it was taken by surprise. Pantings sounded, and Murgatroyd danced in a fever of anxiety.
Then Calhoun stood up quickly. He stared down at the emaciated figure which had tried to murder him from ambush. That figure panted horribly, now.
"Really," said Calhoun in a professional tone, "as a doctor I'd say that you should be in bed instead of wandering around trying to murder total strangers. When did this trouble begin? I'm going to take your temperature and your pulse. Murgatroyd and I have been hoping to find someone like you. The only other human being I've seen on this planet wasn't able to talk."
He swung his shoulder-pack around and impatiently jerked a sharp-pointed stick out of it. It was the missile, which had been stopped by the pack. He brought out his lab kit. With absolute absorption in the task, he prepared to make a swift check of his would-be murderer's state of health.
It was not good. There was already marked emaciation. The desperately panting young woman's eyes were deep-sunk: hollow. She gasped and gasped. Still gasping, she lapsed into unconsciousness.
"Here," said Calhoun curtly, "you enter the picture, Murgatroyd! This is the sort of thing you're designed to handle!"
He set to work briskly. But presently he said over his shoulder:
"Besides a delicate digestion and a hair-trigger antibody system, Murgatroyd, you ought to have the instincts of a watchdog. I don't like coming that close to being speared by my patients. See if there's anybody else around, won't you?"
"Chee!" said Murgatroyd shrilly. But he didn't understand. He watched as Calhoun deftly drew a small sample of blood from the unconscious young woman and painstakingly put half the tiny quantity into an almost microscopic ampule in the lab kit. Then he moved toward Murgatroyd.
Thetormalwriggled as Calhoun made the injection. But it did not hurt. There was an insensitive spot on his flank where the pain-nerves had been blocked off before he was a week old.
"As one medical man to another," said Calhoun, "what's a good treatment for anoxia when you haven't got any oxygen? You don't know? Neither do I. But we've found out why those chaps in the city tried to shake us to bits, out in space."
He swore in a sudden, bitter anger. Then he looked quickly at the girl, concerned lest she'd heard.
She hadn't. She was still unconscious.
III