Med Ship

I

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, nausea, and 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. As long as it existed the Med Ship was completely independent of all creation outside. However, the cocoon was active. It went hurtling through emptiness at many times the speed of light. The Aesclipus Twenty rode inside it. 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.

The background tape began to make its unobtrusive sounds. In overdrive, of course, the Med Ship was wholly isolated from the normal universe of galaxies and stars. There was, in theory, only one conceivable way in which it could be affected by anything outside its own overdrive field, and that had never happened yet. So there could have been a sepulchral, nerve-racking silence in the small spacecraft but for such sounds as the background tape provided.

Those were trivial, those sounds. One had to pay close attention to hear them. There was the sound of rain, and of traffic, and of wind in treetops and voices too faint for the words to be distinguished, and almost inaudible music—and sometimes laughter. The background tape carried no information; only the assurance that there were still worlds with clouds and people and creatures moving about on them.

But sensory assurance of the existence of a real cosmos is as essential to a man's subjective health as hormones and enzymes to his body. Calhoun would have suffered from the lack of such noises if they'd stopped, but he paid no attention to them when they began.

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 other worlds previously and done great damage. In both other cases a Med Ship man had arrived in time to check and 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 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 reread 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 andantly manufactured overwhelming quantities of antibody for that infection.

It was the remarkable talent of tormals—all tormals—that they could not be infected by any microorganism. They could not ordinarily contract any ailment at all. Their digestive systems rejected any substance that would impair their health, and they had a dynamic reaction to infective material. When their normal defenses were bypassed and pathogenic material was put into their bloodstream, they produced antibodies, their structure could be determined and they could be synthesized in any desire quantity. So whatever infection a new planet might offer, it could be brought under control.

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 worshiped 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 Horse's 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 perceptible 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 staring 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 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 airlock'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 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 airlock 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 off 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.

Another item. This had been most painstakingly contrived. There must be orders to take effect if the first part did not dispose of Calhoun. The ship had been a deadfall trap, which he'd evaded. It might now be a booby trap, just in case the deadfall failed to work. Yes. A man who orders a machine to commit murder will have given it other orders in case its first attempt fails. If Calhoun went down to verify his suspicion of an extra control-central, that might be the trigger that would blast the whole ship; that in any event would try to kill him again.

Murgatroyd said, "Chee! Chee!" The vision screens meant to him that there must be people waiting outside to give him sweet cakes and coffee. He began to be impatient. He added in a fretful tone, "Chee!"

"I don't like it either, Murgatroyd," said Calhoun wryly. "Somebody's tried to kill us—at any rate me—and he must think he had some reason, but I can't guess what it is! I can't even guess how anybody could get to a Med Ship at headquarters to gimmick it if they wanted to slaughter innocent people like you and me! Somebody must have done it!"

"Chee! Chee!" said Murgatroyd, urgently.

"You may have a point there," said Calhoun slowly. "We, or at least I, should be dead. We are expected to be dead. There may be arrangements to make certain we don't disappoint somebody. Maybe we'd better play dead and find out. It's probably wiser than trying to find out and getting killed."

A man who has detected one booby trap or deadfall designed for him is likely to suspect more. Calhoun was inclined to go over his ship with a fine-toothed comb and look for them. A setter of booby traps would be likely to anticipate exactly that and prepare for it. Lethally.

Calhoun looked at the pilot's chair. It might not be wise to sit there. Anybody who received the ship's self-sent call would receive with it an image of that chair and whoever sat in it. To play dead, he shouldn't do anything a dead man couldn't do. So he shrugged. He sat down on the floor.

Murgatroyd looked at him in surprise. The signal going-out light burned steadily. That signal now filled a sphere two hundred million miles across. If there was a ship waiting to pick it up—and there'd be no reason for the call otherwise—it might be one or two or ten light-hours away. Nobody could tell within light-hours where a ship would break out of overdrive after three weeks in it.

Calhoun began to rack his brains. He couldn't guess the purpose of his intended murder, but he didn't mean to underestimate the man who intended it.

Murgatroyd went to sleep, curled up against Calhoun's body. There were the random noises a ship tape makes for human need. Absolute silence is unendurable. So there were small sounds released in the ship. Little, meaningless noises. Faint traffic. Faint conversation. Very faint music. Rain, and wind, and thunder as heard from a snug, tight house. It had no significance, so one did not listen to it, but its absence would have been unendurable.

The air apparatus came on and hummed busily, and presently shut off. The separate astrogation unit seemed to cough, somewhere. It was keeping track of the position of the ship, adding all accelerations and their durations—even in overdrive—ending with amazingly exact data on where the ship might be.

Presently Murgatroyd took a deep breath and woke up. He regarded Calhoun with a sort of jocular interest. For Calhoun to sit on the floor was unusual. Murgatroyd realized it.

It was at just this moment, but it was hours after breakout, that the space communicator speaker said metallically, "Calling ship in distress! Calling ship in distress! What's the trouble?"

This was not a normal reply to any normal call. A ship answering any call whatever should identify the caller and itself. This wasn't normal. Calhoun did not stir from where he sat on the floor. From there, he wouldn't be visible to whoever saw a picture of the pilot's chair. The call came again.

"Calling ship in distress! Calling ship in distress! What's your trouble? We read your call! What's the trouble?"

Murgatroyd knew that voices from the communicator should be answered. He said, "Chee?" and when Calhoun did not move he spoke more urgently, "Chee-chee-chee!"

Calhoun lifted him to his feet and gave him a pat in the direction of the pilot's chair. Murgatroyd looked puzzled. Like all tormals, he liked to imitate the actions of men. He was disturbed by breaks in what he'd considered unchangeable routine. Calhoun pushed him. Murgatroyd considered the push a license. He padded to the pilot's chair and swarmed into it. He faced the communicator screen.

"Chee!" he observed. "Chee! Chee-chee! Chee!"

He probably considered that he was explaining that for some reason Calhoun was not taking calls today, and that he was substituting for the Med Ship man. However, it wouldn't give that impression at the other end of the communication link-up. It would be some time before his words reached whoever was calling, but Murgatroyd said zestfully, "Chee-chee!" and then grandly, "Chee!" and then in a confidential tone he added, "Chee-chee-chee-chee!"

Anybody who heard him would be bound to consider that he was the tormal member of the Med Ship's crew, that her human crew member was somehow missing, and that Murgatroyd was trying to convey that information.

There came no further calls. Murgatroyd turned disappointedly away. Calhoun nodded rather grimly to himself; somewhere there would be a ship homing on the call the Med Ship was sending without orders from him. Undoubtedly somebody in that other ship watched, and had seen Murgatroyd or would see him. It would be making a very brief overdrive hop toward the Med Ship. Then it would check the line again, and another hop. It would verify everything. The care taken in the call just made was proof that somebody was cagey. At the next call, if they saw Murgatroyd again, they would be sure that Calhoun was gone from the Med Ship. Nobody would suspect a furry small animal with long whiskers and a prehensile tail of deception.

Murgatroyd came back to Calhoun, who still sat on the floor lest any normal chair be part of a booby trap to check on the success of the air-lock device.

Time passed. Murgatroyd went back to the communicator and chattered at it. He orated in its direction. He was disappointed that there was no reply.

A long time later the communicator spoke briskly—the automatic volume control did not work, until the first syllable was halfway spoken. It had to be very neat indeed.

"Calling distressed ship! Calling distressed ship! We are close to you. Get a line on this call and give us coordinates."

The voice stopped and Calhoun grimaced. While the distress call—if it was a distress call—went out from the Med Ship there was no need for better guidance. Normally, a ship legitimately answering a call will write its own identification on the spreading waves of its communicator. However, this voice didn't name Aesclipus Twenty. It didn't name itself. If these messages were picked up some light-hours away on a planet of the sun Kryder, nobody could realize that a Med Ship was one of the two ships involved, or gain any idea who or what the other ship might be. It was concealment. It was trickiness. It fitted into the pattern of the false images still apparent on the Med Ship's screens and the deceptive data given by its instruments.

The voice from outside the ship boomed once more and then was silent. Murgatroyd went back to the screen. He made oratorical gestures, shrilled, "Chee-chees," and then moved away as if very busy about some other matter.

Again a long, long wait before anything happened. Then there was a loud, distinct clanking against the Med Ship's hull. Calhoun moved quickly. He couldn't have been seen from the communicator before, and he'd wanted to hear anything that came to the Med Ship. Now it would probably be boarded, but he did not want to be seen until he had more information.

He went into the sleeping cabin and closed the door behind him. He stopped at a very small cupboard and put something in his pocket. He entered a tall closet where his uniforms hung stiffly. He closed that door. He waited.

More clankings. At least two spacesuited figures had landed on the Med Ship's hull-plating. They'd still have long, slender space ropes leading back to their own ship. They clanked their way along the hull to the open airlock door. Calhoun heard the changed sound of their magnetic shoe soles as they entered the air-lock. They'd loosen the space ropes now and close the door. They did. He heard the sound of the outer door sealing itself. There was the hissing of air going into the lock.

Then the inner door opened. Two figures came out. They'd be carrying blasters at the ready as they emerged. Then he heard Murgatroyd.

"Chee-chee-chee! Chee!"

He wouldn't know exactly how to act. He normally took his cue from Calhoun. He was a friendly little animal. He had never received anything but friendliness from humans, and of course he couldn't imagine anything else. So he performed the honors of the ship with a grand air. He welcomed the newcomers. He practically made a speech of cordial greeting.

Then he waited hopefully to see if they'd brought him any sweet cakes or coffee. He didn't really expect it, but a tormal can always dream.

They hadn't brought gifts for Murgatroyd. They didn't even respond to his greeting. A tormal was standard on a Med Ship. They ignored him. Calhoun heard the clickings as spacesuit faceplates opened.

"Evidently," said a rumbling voice, "he's gone. Very neat. Nothing to clean up. Not even anything unpleasant to remember."

A second voice said curtly, "It'll be unpleasant if I don't cut off the rest of it!"

There was a snapping sound, as if a wire had forcibly been torn free from something. It was probably a cable to the control-board which, in the place of a rarely or never used switch, had connected something not originally intended, but which if the cable were broken could not act. Most likely the snapping of this wire should return the ship to a proper control-central system's guidance and operation. It did.

"Hm," said the first voice, "there's Kryder on the screens, and there's our ship. Everything's set."

"Wait!" commanded the curt voice. "I take no chances, I'm going to cut that thing off down below!"

Someone moved away. He wore a spacesuit. The faint creaking of its constant volume joints were audible. He left the control-room. His magnetic shoes clanked on uncarpeted metal steps leading down. He was evidently headed for the mechanical and electronic section of the ship. Calhoun guessed that he meant to cut completely loose the extra, gimmicked control-central unit that had operated the ship through the stages that should have led to his death. Apparently it could still destroy itself and the Med Ship.

The other man moved about the cabin. Calhoun heard Murgatroyd say, "Chee-chee!" in a cordial tone of voice. The man didn't answer. There are people to whom all animals, and even tormals are merely animate objects. There was suddenly the rustling of paper. He'd found the data sheets Calhoun had been studying to the very last instant before breakout.

Clankings. The man with the curt voice came back from below.

"I fixed it," he said shortly. "It can't blow now!"

"Look here!" said the rumbling voice, amused. "He had reports about your Med Ship on Castor IV!" He quoted sardonically, "It has to be assumed that a blaster was fired inside the ship. In any event the ship's fuel stores blew and shattered it to atoms. There is no possibility for more than guesses as to the actual cause of the disaster. The Med Ship's doctor was evidently killed, and there was some panic. The destruction of a large sum in currency, which the Med Ship was to have left off at a nearby planet to secure the shipment of uncontaminated foodstuffs to Castor IV, caused some delay in the restoration of normal health and nourishment on the planet. However—" The rumbling voice chuckled. "That's Kelo! Kelo wrote this report!"

The curt voice said, "I'm going to check things."

Calhoun heard the sounds of a thorough checkover, from air apparatus to space communicator. Then the ship was swung about, interplanetary drive went on and off and somebody who knew Med Ships made sure that the Aesclipus Twenty responded properly to all controls. Then the curt voice said, "All right. You can go now."

One man went to the air-lock and entered it. The lock-pumps boomed and stopped. The outer lock door opened and closed. The man left behind evidently got out of his spacesuit. He carried it below. He left it. He returned as the rumbling voice came out of a speaker, "I'm back on our ship. You can go now."

"Thanks," said the curt voice, sarcastically.

Calhoun knew that the newcomer to the ship had seated himself at the control-board. He heard Murgatroyd say, almost incredulously, "Chee? Chee?"

"Out of my way!" snapped the curt voice.

Then the little Med Ship swung, and seemed to teeter very delicately as it was aimed with very great care close to the nearby yellow star. Before, the ship's screens had untruthfully insisted that Med Service Headquarters surrounded the ship. Now they worked properly. There were stars by myriads of myriads, and they looked as if they might be very close. Yet the bright yellow sun would be the nearest, and it was light-hours away. A light-hour is the distance a ray of light will travel, at a hundred eighty-odd thousand miles per second, during thirty-six hundred of them.

There was a sensation of shocking dizziness and intolerable nausea, swiftly repeated as the Med Ship made an overdrive hop to carry it only a few light-hours. Then there was that appalling feeling of contracting spiral fall. Murgatroyd said protestingly, "Chee!"

Then Calhoun moved quietly out of the closet into the sleeping cabin, and then out of that. He was more than halfway to the control-board before the man seated there turned his head. Then Calhoun leaped ferociously. He had a pocket blaster in his hand, but he didn't want to use it if it could be helped.

It was just as effective as a set of brass knuckles would have been, though. Before the other man regained consciousness, Calhoun had him very tidily bound and was looking interestedly over the contents of his pockets. They were curious. Taken literally, they seemed to prove that the man now lying unconscious on the floor was a Med Ship man on professional assignment, and that he was entitled to exercise all the authority of the Med Service itself.

On the word of his documents, he was considerably more of a Med Ship man than Calhoun himself.

"Curiouser and curiouser!" observed Calhoun to Murgatroyd. "I'd say that this is one of those tangled webs we weave when first we practice to deceive. But what's going on?"

III

The Aesclipus Twenty hovered, using emergency rocket fuel lavishly while her motion relative to the ground below her carried her past a ridge of high, snow clad mountains and then over a shoreline with pack ice piled against its beaches.

This was not the planet from which a call had been sent and which Calhoun was answering. There was no sign of habitation anywhere. Cold blue sea swept past below. There were some small ice cakes here and there, but as the shore was left behind they dwindled in number and the water surface became unbroken save by waves. The mountains sank to the horizon, and then ahead—in the direction of the Med Ship's motion—an island appeared. It was small and rocky and almost entirely snow-covered. There was no vegetation. It was entirely what Calhoun had expected from his examination by electron telescope from space.

This was approximately the equator of the planet Kryder III, which was one planetary orbit farther out than the world which was Calhoun's proper destination. This was an almost frozen planet. It would be of very little use to the inhabitants of Kryder II. There might be mineral deposits worth the working, but for colonization it would be useless.

Calhoun very painstakingly brought the little spaceship down on the nearest possible approach to bare flat stone. Ragged, precipitous peaks rose up on either hand as the ship descended. Miniature glaciers and waterfalls of ice appeared. Once there was a sudden tumult and a swarm of furry—not feathered—creatures poured out of some crevice and swarmed skyward, doubtless making a great outcry because of having been disturbed.

Then the rocket flames touched ice and stone. Steam floated in clouds about the ship. It appeared on the vision screens as an opaque whiteness. Then the Med Ship tapped stone, and tapped again, and then settled only very slightly askew on what would have to be fairly solid rock. Writhing steam tendrils blotted out parts of all the outside world for long minutes afterward. At last, though, it cleared.

Murgatroyd looked at the snowscape. He saw a place of cold and ice and desolation. He seemed to reach a conclusion.

"Chee!" he said with decision.

He went back to his private cubbyhole. He'd have none of such a landing place. He preferred to touch ground where there were people to stuff him with assorted edibles.

Calhoun waited alertly until it was certain that the ship's landing-fins had complete solidity under them. Then he pushed himself away from the control-board and nodded to his prisoner.

"Here we are," he observed. "This is Kryder III. You didn't intend to land here. Neither did I. We both expected to touch ground on Kryder II, which is inhabited. This world isn't. According to the Directory, the average daytime temperature here is two degrees Centigrade. We've landed on an island which is forty miles away from a continental landmass. Since you aren't inclined to be cooperative, I'm going to leave you here, with such food as I can spare and reasonable equipment for survival. If I can, I'll come back here for you. If I can't, I won't. I suggest that while I get things ready for you to go aground, that you think over your situation. If you give me information that will make it more likely I can come back, it'll be all to the good for you. Anything you hold out will lessen my chances and therefore yours. I'm not going to argue about it. I'm not threatening you. I'm simply stating the facts. Think it over."

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, or slowly evaporating oil—such as make fingerprints—or 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 coincident 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 meant 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, there was nothing to be heard anywhere except cold and senseless sounds of desolation. Murgatroyd wailed heartbrokenly.

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 the ship, 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 up a file on the computer. 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 file. It dealt with antigens and antibodies. He made more notes and consulted a third file.

He worked carefully with pencil and paper and then, with his memos at hand, Calhoun set the computer 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.

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 landing . . . response to planetary health department request for service."

Calhoun 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 adjustment 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.

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-percent 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 velocity 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.

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. It was 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!"

Calhoun dropped an odorous pellet on the ground and moved away on a compass course. He had a hand lamp, which he used sparingly. There were tree trunks to run into and roots to stumble over and much brushwood to be thrust through. Ultimately he came upon a highway. He deposited a pellet. With his hand lamp off, he searched as much of the sky as he could. He concluded that there was a faint glow in the sky to southward. He set out along the highway toward it.

It was not less than four miles away, and then there was a small town, and it seemed lifeless. Street lights burned, but there were no lighted windows anywhere. There was no motion.

He moved cautiously among its streets. Here and there he saw a sign, "Quarantine." He nodded. Things had gotten really bad! Normal sanitary measures would prevent the spread of contagion of a normal kind. When infections led to the quarantine of every house where plague appeared, it meant that doctors were getting panicky and old-fashioned. However, the ideas of the causes of pestilences would remain modern. Nobody would suspect an epidemic of being actually a crime.

He found a merchandise center. He found a food shop. All the night was dark and silent. He listened for a long, long time, and then committed burglary.

With his hand lamp turned down to the faintest of glimmers, he began to accumulate parcels. There was plague in this area and this town. Therefore, he painstakingly picked out parcels of every variety of foodstuff in the food shop's stock. He stuffed his loot into a bag. He carried everything, even salt and sugar and coffee, meat, bread, and vegetables in their transparent coverings. He took a sample—the smallest possible—of everything he could find.

He piously laid an interstellar currency note on the checkout desk. He left. He went back to the highway by which he'd arrived. He trudged four miles to where a pellet designed for something else made a distinctive patch of unpleasant smell. He turned and traveled by compass until he found another evil-smelling spot. Again by compass . . . and he arrived back at the Med Ship. He went in.

Murgatroyd greeted him with inarticulate cries, embracing his legs and protesting vehemently of his sufferings during Calhoun's absence. To keep from stepping on him, Calhoun tripped. The bag of his burglarized acquisitions fell. It broke. Something smashed.

"Stop it!" commanded Calhoun firmly. "I missed you too. But I've got work to do, and I didn't run across any ditch water. I've got to go out again."

He forcibly prevented Murgatroyd from going with him, and he spent an hour fumbling for a swampy spot in the dark forest. In the end he packed up damp and half-rotted woods-mold. He carried that back to the ship. Then he began to collect the grocery packages he'd dropped. A package of coffeebeans had broken.

"Damn!" said Calhoun.

He gathered up the spilled beans. Murgatroyd assisted. Murgatroyd adored coffee. Calhoun found him popping the beans into his mouth and chewing in high delight.

He went about the essential, mundane labor he'd envisioned. He prepared what a physician of much older times would have called a decoction of rotted leaves. He examined it with a microscope. It was admirable! There were paramecia and rotifers and all sorts of agile microscopic creatures floating, swimming, squirming and darting about in the faintly brownish solution.

"Now," said Calhoun, "we will see if we see anything."

He put the fraction of a drop of a standard and extremely mild antiseptic on the microscope slide. The rotifers and the paramecia and the fauna of the ditch water died. Which, of course, was to be expected. Single-celled animals are killed by concentrations of poison which are harmless to greater animals. Antiseptics are poisons and poisons are antiseptics, but antiseptics are poisons only in massive doses. But to a rotifer or to paramecia all doses are massive.

"Therefore," explained Calhoun to a watching and inquisitive Murgatroyd, "I act more like an alchemist than a sane man. I feel apologetic, Murgatroyd. I am embarrassed to make decoctions and to mix them with synthesized ditch water. But what else can I do? I have to identify the cause of the plague here, without having contact with a single patient because Doctor Kelo . . ."

He shrugged and continued his activities. He was making solutions, decoctions, infusions of every kind of foodstuff the food shop he'd burglarized contained. The plague was not caused by an agent itself in infections. It was caused by something which allowed infections to thrive unhindered in human bodies. So Calhoun made soups of meat, all the kinds of meat, or grain and grain products, and vegetables taken from their transparent coverings. Even such items as sugar, salt, pepper and coffee were included.

Those solutions went upon microscope slides, one by one. With each, in turn, Calhoun mingled the decoction of rotting vegetation which was, apparently, as well-suited for his research as stagnant water from a scummy pond. The animalcules of the decoction appreciated their diverse food supplies. They fed. They throve. Given time, they would have multiplied prodigiously.

Eventually Calhoun came to the solution of coffee. He mixed it with his experimental microscope-animal zoo, and the paramecia died. Rotifers ceased to whirl and dart about upon their sub-miniature affairs. When an infusion of coffee from the food shop was added to the liquid environment of one-celled animals, they died.

Calhoun checked. It was so. He made an infusion of coffee from the Med Ship's stores. It was not so. Coffee from the ship was not fatal to paramecia. Coffee from the shop was. But it would not follow that coffee from the shop would be fatal to humans. The alcoholic content of beer is fatal to paramecia. Wine is a fair antiseptic. No! The food store coffee could very well be far less toxic than the wildest of mouthwashes, and still kill the contents of Calhoun's ditch-water zoo.

However, the point was that something existed which allowed infections to thrive unhindered in human bodies. Something destroyed the body's defenses against infections. Nothing more would be needed to make the appearance of a plague. Every human being carries with him the seeds of infection, from oral bacteria to intestinal flora, and even often streptococci in the hair follicles of the skin. Destroy the body's means of defense and anyone was bound to develop one of the diseases whose sample bacteria he carries about with him.

Instantly one ceased to think of the plague on Kryder II—and Castor IV before it—instantly one ceased to think of the epidemic as an infection miraculously spreading without any germ or bacterium or virus to carry it, instantly one thought of it as a toxin only, a poison only, a compound as monstrously fatal as the toxin of—say—the bacillus clostridium botulinum. Immediately everything fell into place. The toxin that could simulate a plague could be distributed on a foodstuff: grain or meat or neatly packaged coffee. It would be distributed in such dilution that it was harmless. It would not be detected by any culture-medium process. In such concentration as humans would receive, it would have one effect, and one effect only. It would hinder the body's formation of antibodies. It would prevent the production of those compounds which destroy infective agents to which human beings are exposed. It would simply make certain that no infection would be fought. Antibodies introduced from outside could cure a disease the body could not resist, but there would always be other diseases. . . . Yet, in a concentration greater than body fluids could contain, it killed the creatures that thrived in ditch water.

Calhoun consulted the slip of paper the computer had printed out for him. He went down to the ship's stores. A Med Ship carries an odd assortment of supplies. Here were the basic compounds from which an unlimited number of other compounds could be synthesized. With the computer-slip for a prescription form, he picked out certain ones. He went back to the ditch-water samples presently. He worked very painstakingly. Presently, he had a whitish powder. He made a dilute—a very dilute solution of it. He added that solution to ditch water. The paramecia and rotifers and other tiny creatures swam about in bland indifference. He put in a trace of coffee decoction. Presently, he was trying to find out how small a quantity of his new solution, added to the coffee infusion, made it harmless to paramecia.

It was not an antidote to the substance the coffee contained. It did not counter the effects of that monstrously toxic substance, but it combined with that substance. It destroyed it; it was the answer to the plague on Kryder II.

It was broad daylight when he'd finished the horribly tedious detail work the problem had required. In fact, it was close to sundown. He said tiredly to Murgatroyd, "Well, we've got it!"

Murgatroyd did not answer. Calhoun did not notice for a moment or so. Then he jerked his head about.

Murgatroyd lay on the Med Ship floor, his eyes half-closed. His breath came in quick, shallow pantings.

He'd eaten coffeebeans when they fell on the floor of the control-room. Calhoun picked him up, his lips angrily compressed. Murgatroyd neither resisted nor noticed. Calhoun examined him with a raging, painstaking care.

Murgatroyd was ill. He came of a tribe which was never sick of any infectious disease; they reacted with explosive promptness to any trace of contagion and produced antibodies which would destroy any invading pathogen. His digestive system was normally no less efficient, rejecting any substance which was unwholesome. But the toxic compound which caused the plague on Kryder II was not unwholesome in any direct sense. It did not kill anybody, by itself. It simply inhibited, it prevented, the formation of those antibodies which are a creature's defense against disease.

Murgatroyd had a fully developed case of pneumonia. It had developed faster in him than in a human being. It was horribly more severe. He'd developed it from some single diplococcus pneumonia upon his fur, or perhaps on Calhoun's garments, or possibly from the floor or wall of the Med Ship. Such microorganisms are everywhere. Humans and animals are normally immune to any but massive infection. But Murgatroyd was at the very point of death from a disease his tribe normally could not—could not!—contract.

Calhoun made the tests required to make him absolutely certain. Then he took his new solution and prepared to make use of it.

"Fortunately, Murgatroyd," he said grimly, "we've something to try for this situation. Hold still!"

VI

Murgatroyd sipped a cup of coffee with infinite relish. He finished it. He licked the last drop. He offered it to Calhoun and said inquiringly, "Chee?"

"It probably won't hurt you to have one more cup," said Calhoun. He added irrelevantly, "I'm very glad you're well, Murgatroyd!"

Murgatroyd said complacently, "Chee-chee!"

Then the space communicator said metallically, "Calling Med Ship! Calling Med Ship! Calling Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty! Ground calling Aesclipus Twenty!"

The Med Ship was then in orbit around Kryder II. It was a sound, high orbit, comfortably beyond atmosphere. Calhoun was officially waiting for word of how his communication and instruction to the authorities aground had turned out. He said, "Well?"

"I'm the Planetary Health Minister," said a voice. Somehow it sounded infinitely relieved. "I've just had reports from six of our hospitals. They check with what you told us. The paramecia test works. There were a number of different foods—ah—contaminated at their packaging points, so that even if someone had identified one food as the cause of the plague in one place, in another area it wouldn't be true. It was clever! It was damnably clever! And of course we've synthesized your reagent and tried it on laboratory animals we were able—by your instructions—to give the plague."

"I hope," said Calhoun politely, "that the results were satisfactory."

The other man's voice broke suddenly.

"One of my children . . . he will probably recover, now. He's weak. He's terribly weak! But he'll almost certainly live, now that we can protect him from reinfection. We've started planet-wide use of your reagent."

"Correction," said Calhoun. "It's not my reagent. It is a perfectly well-known chemical compound. It's not often used, and perhaps this is its first use medically, but it's been known for half a century. You'll find it mentioned . . ."

The voice at the other end of the communication link said fiercely, "You will excuse me if I say nonsense! I wanted to report that everything you've told us has proved true. We have very many desperately ill, but new patients have already responded to medication to counter the—contamination of food they'd taken. They've gotten thoroughly well of normal disease and haven't developed others. Our doctors are elated. They are convinced. You can't have any idea how relieved . . ."

Calhoun glanced at Murgatroyd and said dryly, "I've reason to be pleased myself. How about Doctor Kelo and his friends?"

"We'll get him! He can't get off the planet, and we'll find him! There's only one ship aground at the spaceport; it came in two days ago. It's stayed in port under self-quarantine at our request. We've instructed it not to take anyone aboard. We're chartering it to go to other planets and buy foodstuffs to replace the ones we're testing and destroying."

Calhoun, stroking Murgatroyd, said more dryly than before, "I wouldn't. You'd have to send currency to pay for the stuff you want to import. On two previous occasions very, very large sums gathered for that purpose have disappeared. I'm no policeman but that could be the reason for the plague. There are some people who might start a plague for the express purpose of being entrusted with some scores of millions of credits . . ."

There was silence at the other end of the conversation. Then a man's voice, raging, "If that's it!"

Calhoun broke in.

"In my orbit I'll be below your horizon in minutes. I'll call back. My orbit's very close to two hours duration."

"If that's it," repeated the voice, raging, "We'll . . ."

There was silence. Calhoun said very cheerfully, "Murgatroyd, I'm good at guessing the way a relatively honest man's mind works. If I'd told them earlier that the plague victims were murdered, they'd have discounted the rest of what I had to say. But I'm learning the way a criminal's mind works too! It takes a criminal to think of burning down a house to cover up the fact that he robbed it. It takes a criminal to think of killing a man for what he may carry in his pockets. It would take a criminal to start a plague so he can gather money to steal, under the pretense that he's going to use it to buy unpoisoned food to replace the food he's poisoned. I had trouble understanding that!"

Murgatroyd said, "Chee!"

He got up. He walked in a rather wobbly fashion as if testing his strength. He came back and nestled against Calhoun. Calhoun petted him. Murgatroyd yawned. He'd been weakened by his illness. He still didn't understand it. Tormals are not accustomed to being ill.

"Now," said Calhoun reflectively, "I make a guess at how certain criminal minds will work if they eavesdropped just then. We've spoiled their crime on Kryder II. They'd put a lot of time and trouble into committing it. Now they've had their trouble and committed their murders for nothing. I think, I think they'll be angry. With me."

He settled Murgatroyd comfortably. He went about the ship stowing things away. The samples of ditch water and of foodstuffs he placed so no shock or sudden acceleration could spill them. He made sure there were no loose objects about the control-room. He went down below and made especially sure that the extra plastic-sealed control-central unit was properly stowed, and that the spacesuit worn by one of the two men to board the Med Ship at breakout was suitably held fast. They'd be turned over to the laboratories at headquarters. If carefully disassembled the control-central unit would give positive proof that a certain man in the headquarters technical staff had installed it. Suitable measures would be taken. The spacesuit would identify the man now at the bottom of a rocky crevasse on an icy, uninhabited world.

By the time Calhoun's preparations were finished, the ship had nearly completed its orbital round. Calhoun put Murgatroyd in his cubbyhole. He fastened the door so the little animal couldn't be thrown out. He went to the pilot's chair and strapped in.

Presently he called, "Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty calling ground! Med Ship calling ground!"

An enraged voice answered immediately.

"Ground to Med Ship! You were right! The ship in the spaceport lifted off on emergency rockets before we could stop it! It must have listened in when you talked to us before! It got below the horizon before we could lock on!"

"Ah!" said Calhoun comfortably. "And did Doctor Kelo get aboard?"

"He did!" raged the voice. "He did! It's inexcusable! It's unbelievable! He did get aboard and we moved to seize the ship and its rockets flamed and it got away!"

"Ah!" said Calhoun, again comfortably. "Then give me coordinates for landing."

He had them repeated. Of course, if someone were eavesdropping . . . but he shifted the Med Ship's orbit to bring him to rendezvous at a certain spot at a certain time, a certain very considerable distance out from the planet.

"Now," he said to Murgatroyd, "we'll see if I understand the psychology of the criminal classes, in fact . . ."

Then he remembered that Murgatroyd was locked in his cubbyhole. He shrugged. He sat very alertly in the pilot's chair while the planet Kryder II revolved beneath him.

There was silence except for those minute noises a ship has to make to keep from seeming like the inside of a tomb. Murmurings. Musical notes. The sound of traffic. All very faint but infinitely companionable.

The needle of the nearest-object dial stirred from where it had indicated the distance to the planet's surface. Something else was nearer. It continued to approach. Calhoun found it and swung the Med Ship to face it, but he waited. Presently, he saw an infinitesimal sliver of reflected sunlight against the background of distant stars. He mentally balanced this fact against that, this possibility against that.

He flicked on the electron telescope. Yes. There were minute objects following the other ship. More of them appeared, and still more. They were left behind by the other ship's acceleration, but they spread out like a cone of tiny, deadly, murderous missiles. They were. If any one crashed into the Med Ship it could go clear through from end to end.

This was obviously the ship that had placed a man aboard the Med Ship to impersonate Calhoun aground. It was the ship whose company was ultimately responsible for the plague on Kryder II, and before that on Castor IV, and for another before that. It had been aground to receive, at a suitable moment, very many millions of credits in currency to pay for unpoisoned foodstuffs for Kryder II. Through Calhoun, it had had all its trouble for nothing. It came to destroy the Med Ship as merited if inadequate punishment.

However, Calhoun found himself beautifully confident in his own competence. He was headed, of course, for a ship that meant to destroy him. It tossed out missiles to accomplish that purpose. Dropping behind as they did, the effect was of the other ship towing a cone-shaped net of destruction.

So Calhoun jammed down his rocket-controls to maximum acceleration and plunged toward it. It was a ship guided by criminals, with criminal psychology. They couldn't understand and at first couldn't believe that Calhoun—who should be their victim—would think of anything but attempts to escape. But presently it was borne upon them that he seemed to intend to ram them in mid-space.

The other ship swerved. Calhoun changed course to match. The other ship wavered. Its pilot couldn't understand. He'd lost the initiative. The Med Ship plunged for the very nose of the other vessel. They moved toward each other with vastly more than the speed of rifle bullets. At the last instant the other ship tried crazily to sheer off. At that precise moment Calhoun swung the Med Ship into a quarter-turn. He cut his rockets and the Aesclipus Twenty plunged ahead, moving sidewise, and then Calhoun cut in his rockets again. Their white-hot flames, flittering through a quarter-mile of space, splashed upon the other ship. They penetrated. They sliced the other ship into two ragged and uneven halves, and those two halves wallowed onward.

The communicator chattered, "Calling Med Ship! Calling Med Ship! What's happened?"

At that time Calhoun was too busy to reply. The Med Ship was gaining momentum away from the line of the other ship's course, around which very many hurtling objects also moved. They would sweep through the space in which the other ship had died. Calhoun had to get away from them.

He did. Minutes later he answered the still-chattering call from the ground.

"There was a ship," he said evenly, "some ship which tried to smash me out here. but something seems to have happened to it. It's in two parts now, and it will probably crash in two pieces somewhere aground. I don't think there will be any survivors. I think Doctor Kelo was aboard."

The voice aground conferred agitatedly with others. Then it urgently requested Calhoun to land and receive the gratitude of people already recovering from the virulent pestilence. Calhoun said politely, "My tormal has been ill. It's unprecedented. I need to take him back to headquarters. I think I'm through here, anyhow."

He aimed the Med Ship, while voices made urgent official noises from the planet. He aimed very carefully for the sun around which the planet which was the Med Service Headquarters revolved. Presently he pushed a button, and the Med Ship did something equivalent to making a hole, crawling into it, and pulling the hole in after itself. In fact, it went into overdrive. It sped on toward headquarters at many times the speed of light, nestled in that cocoon of stressed space which was like a private sub-cosmos of its own.

Calhoun said severely, when matters settled down, "Three weeks of peace and quiet in overdrive, Murgatroyd, will be much better for you than landing on Kryder II and being fed to bursting with sweet cakes and coffee! I tell you so as your physician!"

"Chee," said Murgatroyd dolefully. "Chee-chee-chee!"

The Med Ship drove on.