Med Ship

I

There wasn't a thing he could put his finger on, but from the beginning Calhoun didn't feel comfortable about the public health situation on Lanke. There wasn't anything really wrong about it, not anything. Calhoun felt that it was just a little bit too good to be true. He and Murgatroyd the tormal had arrived in the little Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty. They'd been greeted with effusive cordiality. Health Department officials opened everything to Calhoun's examination, with a smoothness and speed that almost looked like the planetary authorities were anxious for him to finish his job and get away from there. The Health Minister practically jumped through hoops to provide all the information he could ask for. The communicable diseases appeared to be well in hand. The average age-at-death rate for the planet was the fraction of a decimal-point low, but it was accounted for by a microscopic rise in the accidental-death reports. Calhoun couldn't find a thing to justify the feeling that a cover-up job was being done. If it was, it was being done perfectly. He was a little bit irritated by his own suspicions.

Still, he went through the routine for three sunny days and evenings. He had some new developments in the art of medicine that Med Service Headquarters wanted to have spread about. He explained them to attentive listeners. In turn, he listened interestedly to what he was told, and the night before he was to lift off for his return to headquarters he attended a top-drawer medical society meeting in a high ceilinged lecture hall in the Health Department building.

The Health Minister introduced him in a typical speech in which he expressed the value of modern medical science in strictly businessman terms. He mentioned that absenteeism due to sickness was at the lowest figure ever known in the industries of Lanke. The extension of hormone-balance checkups, with other preventive practices, had reduced the overall incidence of sickness requiring hospitalization to the point where in the past ten years or so many thousands of hospital beds had ceased to be required. Which added so many millions of credits every year to the prosperity of Lanke.

There was another item which nobody thought about, but was perhaps the most valuable of all the achievements of medical science. He referred to the fact that epidemics were now substantially impossible. It was not necessary to calculate what an actual epidemic might cost. One could think simply of what the danger might be to see what medical science added to the planetary wealth. In interstellar trade alone, the simple threat of a dangerous plague on Lanke would mean the quarantining of the planet, and that would mean a financial panic, the closing of factories whose products could not be sold, widespread unemployment, appalling drops in the values of securities, and it could mean runs on banks, the abandonment of construction projects and even curtailment of agricultural production. The wealth that modern medical science contributed to the economy was the true great achievement of the medical profession! Much of this achievement was due to Lanke physicians alone, but the Interstellar Medical Service had made its contributions too, and he was happy to present to them Doctor Calhoun of that Service, whom many of them had met and talked to in the past few days.

Calhoun's speech, of course, was anticlimactic. He said the normal thing for such occasions. It amounted to polite congratulations to the doctors of Lanke for doing what doctors were supposed to do. He did feel, definitely, that something was being hidden from him, but he hadn't the evidence to justify him in saying so. So he made a speech in no wise remarkable and sat down to wait for the end of the meeting.

He'd much rather have been aboard the Med Ship. Murgatroyd was much better company than the Health Minister beside him. Murgatroyd didn't think of every possible human activity in terms of the money it made or saved. Murgatroyd had enjoyed his stay on Lanke. Calhoun hadn't.

Murgatroyd didn't have to pretend interest while people made dull speeches. Murgatroyd was a small, furry, cordial animal who liked humans and was liked by them. Aground, in human society, he made friends and charmed people and managed to get much petting and quantities of the sweet cakes and coffee he adored. Murgatroyd had fun. There'd been no call for use of the special talent that only tormals in all the galaxy possess, and he'd had a happy time. Calhoun looked forward to the restfulness of being back in the Med Ship with him, unbothered by the conviction that something was being put over that he couldn't put a finger on.

Then, suddenly, there were shoutings in another part of the building. A blaster rasped savagely. More shouts, more blasters went off in a storm of fire. Then there was dead silence.

In the lecture hall there was absolute stillness, as startled men listened for more of those decidedly unusual sounds.

They didn't come, but a man in police uniform did enter the back of the hall. He wore a look of most unofficial terror on his face. He spoke to the first doctor he came to inside that door. The doctor's face went gray. He went unsteadily out. Someone asked a question of the policeman. He answered and went out also, as if reluctantly. Others at the meeting moved to ask what had happened and what the policeman said.

The news—whatever it was—went about the hall with extraordinary dispatch. As each man heard, he paled. Some seemed near to fainting. There began, immediately, a universal attempt to leave the lecture hall without attracting attention.

"Dear me!" said the Health Minister, sitting on the speakers' platform beside Calhoun. "What can be the matter? Wait here and I'll find out."

He moved away. He stopped someone and asked a question. He was startled. He asked more questions. He came back to Calhoun in something like panic.

"What was it?" asked Calhoun.

"A—a burglar," said the Health Minister. His teeth seemed to be trying to chatter. "Just a burglar. There've been—robberies. We try to keep crime down, you know. It's an economic waste—terrible! But this man was trying to commit a burglary in—this building. He was discovered and he—jumped or fell from a window." The Health Minister wiped beads of sweat from his forehead. "He's dead. A—a shocking thing, of course. But not important. Not important at all. Not worth mentioning . . ."

Calhoun didn't believe him. The Health Minister was scared. There was no danger here! He was afraid of something a politician might be afraid of. It was that sort of terror. It wasn't too likely, but it might be linked to whatever had been covered up so Calhoun wouldn't discover it. The policeman who'd come in had been frightened too. Why? Then Calhoun looked at the medical society members in the lecture hall. The meeting had been ended by whatever word passed from man to man. The members of the society were leaving. They tried to be dignified, but also they tried to hurry. There was something puzzlingly wrong, and the Health Minister had lied about it. Obviously, more questions would only produce more lies. So Calhoun shrugged.

"Anyhow," he observed, "the meeting's over. It's breaking up. I'll get back to the spaceport."

His actual intentions were somewhat different.

"Yes. Yes. Of course," said the Health Minister, shivering. He didn't seem to think of escorting Calhoun out.

Calhoun joined those leaving the hall and the building. They crowded down the stairs, not waiting for a slower lift. Very many of them looked white and sick. Calhoun reached the outer air. Only yards from the exit there was a half-circle of burning flares, stuck in the ground. They bathed the ground and the side of the Health Department building with a pitiless glare.

There was a dead man on the ground. He'd obviously fallen from a height. None of the eminent physicians streaming out of the building so much as glanced at him. They hastened away in the darkness. Only Calhoun approached the flares. A policeman on watch—badly frightened—warned him back. Calhoun considered coldly. Then he stepped into the light past the protesting officer.

The dead man's mouth was open in a gruesome fashion. While the policeman continued to protest, Calhoun made a brisk, superficial examination. The dead man had lost teeth by dental caries, which was remarkable. He had other cavities filled with metal, a process abandoned for centuries. His garments were not made of normal materials, but of some fiber Calhoun did not recognize. There was a scar on his cheek. Calhoun, bending over, saw that tissues on either side of his nose were swollen and pigmented. The appearance was abnormal.

He picked up a bit of cloth, torn in the dead man's fall down the side of the building. As he examined it, a voice gasped, "Calhoun! What are you doing?" It was the Health Minister, leaving the building of his cabinet department. He trembled uncontrollably. "Stop it! Drop it!"

"I was looking at this man," said Calhoun. "It's queer . . ."

"Come away!" cried the Health Minister hysterically. "You don't know what you're—do . . ." He stopped. He mopped his face, shaking. Then he said, desperately attempting a normal tone, "I'm sorry. It would be a good idea for you to get back to your ship. This man was a criminal. There may be others of his confederates about. The police are going to make a thorough search. We—we civilians should get out of the way."

"But I'd like to look him over!" protested Calhoun. "There's scar tissue on his face! See it? Since when have doctors allowed scar tissue to form in healing wounds? He's lost some teeth and there's a cavity in one of his incisors! How often have you seen dental caries? They simply don't happen anymore!"

The Health Minister swallowed audibly.

"Yes. Yes . . . now that you point it out, I see what you mean. We'll have to do an autopsy. Yes. We'll do an autopsy in the morning. But right now, to cooperate with the police—"

Calhoun looked again at the limp, crumpled figure on the ground. Then he turned away. The last of the medical society members came out of the building. They melted away into the night. Calhoun could almost smell panic in the air.

The Health Minister vanished. Calhoun hailed a skimmer-cab and got into it. On the way to the spaceport he considered darkly. He'd evidently seen something he wasn't supposed to see. It might well be connected with what he hadn't been able to put a finger on. He'd told the Health Minister that he was going back to the spaceport, but that hadn't been his intention then. He'd meant to find a tavern and buy drinks for its habitues until somebody's tongue got loosened. News of a man killed by the police would set tongues wagging in certain kinds of society on any planet.

However, he'd changed his intention. He had a scrap of cloth in his pocket from the dead man's clothing. There was a bit of blood on it. It was extraordinary. The dead man was extraordinary. He'd frightened everybody who seemed to know something Calhoun was not supposed to discover. Considering all he did know, he planned to find out a few things more from that cloth sample.

The skimmer-cab reached the spaceport gate. The guards waved it on. It reached the Med Ship and settled to a stop. Calhoun paid the driver and went into the Med Ship, to be greeted with extravagant enthusiasm by Murgatroyd, who explained with many shrill "Chee-chees" that he did not like to be left alone when Calhoun went elsewhere. Calhoun said, "Hold it, Murgatroyd! Don't touch me!"

He put the sample of cloth with its few specks of blood into a sterile bottle. He snapped the elastic cover in place. Murgatroyd said, "Chee?"

"I've just seen a pack of thoroughly scared men," said Calhoun dryly, "and I've got to see if they were right to be scared."

He washed his hands with some care, and then extended his precautions—he felt absurd about it—to an entire change of clothing. The terror of the dead man puzzled and bothered him.

"Chee-chee-chee!" said Murgatroyd reproachfully.

"I know!" said Calhoun. "You want coffee. I'll make it. But I'm worried!"

Murgatroyd frisked. It was Calhoun's habit to talk to him as if he were a human being. He'd mentioned coffee, and Murgatroyd could recognize that word. He waited for the drink to be made and served. Frowning, Calhoun made it, thinking hard the while. Presently, he passed over the little cup that fitted Murgatroyd's tiny paws.

"There you are. Now listen!" Calhoun spoke vexedly. "I've felt all along that there was something wrong here, and tonight something happened. It could be told in a dozen words. It was, but not to me. A man died and it terrified two policemen, an entire medical society and the Health Minister of the planet. It wasn't the death of a man which did all this. It was something his death or his presence meant. But I wasn't told. I was lied to. Lied to! What did they want me to keep on not knowing?"

Murgatroyd sipped at his cup. He said profoundly, "Chee?"

"I suspect the same thing," said Calhoun, again with vexation. "Generally speaking, facts are hidden only from people whose job it would be to act on them. Facts have been hidden from me. What sort of facts is it my job to act on, Murgatroyd?"

Murgatroyd seemed to consider. He sipped again, reflectively. Then he said with decision, "Chee-chee!"

"I'm very much afraid you're right," Calhoun told him. "The local medical profession has repressed it . . . The Health Minister has a very vivid picture in his mind of what could happen to the economy and the prosperity of Lanke if even the suspicion of an epidemic went about. In short, Murgatroyd, it looks like a thing has been covered up so carefully that it shows. When as much terror as I saw just tonight is felt by everybody—I'd better get to work!"

He put part of the cloth sample—including the small bloodstains—in a culture medium. A fiber or two, though, he examined under a microscope. He shook his head.

"Odd! It's a natural fiber, Murgatroyd. It wasn't made. It grew. They certainly don't grow fibers on Lanke! This man isn't a native son of this planet. Quaint, eh?"

It was quaint. Synthetic fibers were better than natural ones. Nobody used natural fibers anymore. Nobody!

He waited impatiently on the culture from the cloth. While it was still too early to expect any specific results, his impatience got the best of him. He filled a vivo-slide for the culture microscope which would let him watch the behavior of living microorganisms as they grew. He was startled, when he looked at the microscope-screen. There were perfectly commonplace microbes in the culture broth even so early. However, there was one variety that was astonishing. A curious, dancing, spherical, pigmented organism leaped and darted madly. It visibly multiplied at a prodigious rate. When Calhoun added the Daflos reagent to the contents of the slide, certain highly specific color effects appeared. The Daflos pathogenicity test was not infallible, but it wasn't meaningless, either. It said that the dancing, spherical microbes should be highly toxic. They produced a toxin the reagent reacted to. The rate of reproduction was astounding. It should, then, be highly infectious and probably lethal.

Calhoun frowned over the facts. The implications were matters a businessman on Lanke would want hidden, suppressed. A businessman would lie about them, desperately, until the last possible instant. A businessman's government might very well demand of the medical profession that it take precautions without causing undue alarm, and . . . Calhoun knew why the medical men at the meeting looked scared and sick. From the clothing and the blood of a dead man Calhoun had extracted a microbe which was probably that of a deadly plague—so said the Daflor reagents—of enormous infectivity which the clothing, teeth, and scar tissue suggested had come from some other world. This was enough to worry anybody. On Lanke, any physician who caused the danger to be realized, the facts to be known, and a planetary quarantine slapped on Lanke, such a physician would instantly be discredited and subjected to merciless hostility by his government. He'd be ruined professionally, financially and socially, and his family would share in his disgrace and ruin. The terror of the doctors had reason. Until the dead man was found, they'd had no reason for unease. When he was found, they knew instantly what the culture microscope had just told Calhoun. The doctors of Lanke were in a very bad fix. The government would not—would definitely not—permit a planetary quarantine if they could help it. It would not be anything but the automatic assumption that a financial panic and an industrial collapse must be avoided, whatever else had to be allowed. It would be very bad!

Calhoun began to see this with a bitter clarity. A curious flicker of light behind him made him turn. The outside-field detector-light was glowing on the control-board. Normally it lighted only to report that the force fields of a landing grid touched the Med Ship when the ship was to be brought to ground, or else when it was to be lifted off to a distance at which a Lawlor drive could be used. There was no reason for it to come on now.

Then the G.C.—general communication—speaker said:

"Calling Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty! Calling Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty! Spaceport control office calling Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty!"

Calhoun threw the answer switch.

"Aesclipus Twenty here," he said shortly. "What's the matter?"

"Checking, sir," said the voice detachedly. "Are you sealed up?"

Calhoun glanced at the air-lock. Aground, of course, it could be opened like the two sets of doors of a vestibule, with direct communication between the inside of the ship and the outside air. However, without thinking particularly about it, Calhoun had left the Med Ship with its own air-renewal system operating.

"Yes," said Calhoun. "I'm sealed up. Why?"

"Message for you, sir," said the voice.

There was immediately the voice of the Health Minister, racked and upset, coming out of the speaker.

"You are requested to leave Lanke at once," it said agitatedly. "Complaint will be made to the Med Service that you attempted to interfere with police measures against crime. Your ship will be lifted off as of now, and you are forbidden to return."

Calhoun said angrily, "The devil you say! I declare a quarantine—"

The communicator clicked. The Health Minister had cut off. The detached control-office voice said woodenly, "I'm lifting you off, sir, as ordered. Lift-off coming . . ."

Calhoun's mouth opened, to swear. Instantly he saw very many more things it had not been the intention of the Health Minister to tell him. He clenched his hands. This wasn't good!

Then the Med Ship stirred, and instantly thereafter seemed to fall toward the sky. Calhoun angrily flipped on the outside vision-plates and his sensations and the statements of the control-office voice agreed. The Med Ship was being lifted off. Below it, the lights of the spaceport receded. Then the street lights of Lanke's capital city were coming into view from behind tall buildings. They winked into sight from farther toward the dark horizon. The small spaceship went up and up.

The smaller, fainter lights of another city appeared. A little while later, the lights of still another. The capital city's pattern of streets grew ever smaller. More other city-glows appeared and seemed at once to dwindle and to drift toward and under the rising Med Ship. There was nothing to be seen anywhere except those minute, diminishing speckles of light.

Presently, the ship went into cloud cover and for seconds the vision screens were blank. Then it reached clear air again and then there was nothing but the starlit cloud cover below, and ten thousand million stars above.

The Med Ship was being lifted by the spaceport's landing grid. Eventually, the stars crept downward, and seemed to draw together, and the world of Lanke became only a diminishing circular patch of darkness against the galaxy's all-surrounding suns. Then the communicator speaker spoke woodenly again.

"Calling Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty! Calling Aesclip . . ."

"Aesclipus here," said Calhoun coldly.

"You are now five diameters out," said the unemotional voice, "And I am about to release you. Check?"

"Check," said Calhoun sardonically.

He flipped off the G.C. transmitter. He felt the new freedom of the Med Ship. He spoke in an even more sardonic tone to Murgatroyd. "This is a first, Murgatroyd! It's the first time a Med Ship man has ever been thrown off a planet because he found out too much!" Then he added with a definite grimness, "It happens that throwing us off the planet verifies what I was only partly guessing and requires what I was hesitating to do."

His tone disturbed Murgatroyd, who of course could not understand what had happened. But he was upset because Calhoun was. Murgatroyd said shrilly, "Chee-chee!"

"We're going back to headquarters," said Calhoun sourly. "We can take our news there quicker than we can send it. Anyhow they'll need more than you and me on Lanke to handle a plague—especially if it's a bad one. But I don't like it!"

He was angry. But it wasn't unprecedented for planetary governments to try to cover up things that would be bad for business. There'd been attempts before now to conceal outbreaks of disease. Some had probably succeeded. Those that failed turned out very badly indeed. Minor epidemics had become major plagues when a prompt call for Med Service help would have kept them minor and wiped them out. The Med Service had big ships, half a mile long and longer, with laboratories and equipment and personnel that could handle emergencies of planetary size. But very, very many lives had been lost because of governments subordinating everything but business to business. They'd tried to prevent business crises and financial panics and industrial collapse. They'd only delayed them—at incalculable costs in lives.

There was another factor, too. If a planetary government once concealed an emergency of this sort, it would never dare admit it later. A certain world in Cygnus had concealed a serious epidemic in order to protect its interstellar trade. Later the fact was learned by Med Service. It made a check of the public health status of that reckless world, in view of its just-learned medical history. It discovered and announced an imminent second epidemic—a perfectly accurate statement of fact. The first epidemic had not been cleaned up properly by the local physicians. The epidemic was cyclic—with a normal period of high incidence after every so many years. So the Med Service quarantined that world—justly—and took stringent measures—wisely—and there was consequently no second plague. But there were many hard-boiled businessmen who fumed that the Med Service had no reason for its action; that it had been punishing the Cygnus world for violating a primary rule for galactic public health. The planet had concealed a disease that might but hadn't been passed on to its customers. Businessmen believed the quarantine a penalty.

So Calhoun knew grimly that if there'd been a hidden plague on Lanke in the past, it would never be admitted now. Never! And any doctor who revealed the historical fact . . . The reason for the silence of Lanke's doctors was abundantly clear.

But this situation wasn't as simple as the Cygnus affair. The dead man Calhoun had partly examined wasn't a native of Lanke. Yet the doctors of Lanke knew all about him and the plague of which he was dying when blaster bolts drove him to a quicker death. He didn't belong on Lanke. Worse, he didn't belong anywhere else. His state of civilization wasn't appropriate anywhere in the galaxy. But he was positively a man. Calhoun had seen drama tapes about lost colonies and villages of castaways, and even elaborate hiding places for refugees from the laws of planets. But he didn't believe them.

"Still," he said irritably, "where did he come from?"

He felt that there were too many questions already. But there was something definite to do. Several things. For the first of them he swung the Med Ship about and aimed it at the small, remote star cluster where Sector Headquarters was established. He punched the computer keys. He said, "Overdrive coming, Murgatroyd! Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . ."

There was a sudden intolerable giddiness and an instant's insupportable nausea, and the sensation of a spiral fall to nowhere. Then, abruptly, everything was quite all right. The Med Ship was in overdrive, surrounded by a cocoon of stressed space which changed its own position many times faster than the speed of light, and carried the little Med Ship with it.

Calhoun paced up and down the control-room, scowling. "That man," he said abruptly, "wasn't a normal inhabitant of Lanke, Murgatroyd! He didn't grow up on it. He carried microscopic flora and fauna with him—as don't we all?—but they were very probably as alien to Lanke as the man himself. The doctors knew about it, and they were afraid. Afraid! But where did he come from?"

Murgatroyd had retreated to his little cubbyhole in the control-room. He was curled up there with his furry tail draped across his nose. He blinked at Calhoun. When Calhoun talked conversationally, Murgatroyd adored pretending that he discussed abstruse subjects with him. But now Calhoun really talked to himself. Murgatroyd realized it. He said, "Chee!" and prepared to take a nap.

Presently, Calhoun began an angry, systematic search through the Med Ship's library. It was a remarkable storage system for facts. The Aesclipus Twenty was able to carry more reference material for a Med Service man's needs than most national libraries contained. The data-retrieval system was one of the great technical achievements of the previous century. Calhoun had at his fingertips more information on medical subjects than earlier times could have imagined.

The library had nothing to say about a plague which produced—doubtless among other symptoms—enlarged and stiffened, pigmented tissues on either side of a man's nose. Nor did it have any record of a microorganism exactly matching the one he'd gotten from the cloth of the dead man's garments—or the specks of blood included—and suspected of the water he'd washed in.

The really basic question remained, too. Where had the inexplicable man come from?

Calhoun checked the progress of his cultures. All thrived.

Calhoun set up an imaginary globe in space, with Lanke as its center. He set the data-retrieval unit to find a habitable world, not known to be colonized, in that volume of emptiness. An abortive attempt at colonization might have left some castaways behind. That would raise almost as many questions as it answered, but it seemed the most likely approach to the problem.

There was no habitable world in the Stellar Directory portion of the ship's records. He tried a larger volume of space. Then a still larger one. Nothing.

He tried for less than a habitability-one world. Individual survival might be possible where a colony could not live. He set the search-unit to work again. It found a world which was airless, a gas-giant world with intolerable gravity, another which had an equatorial temperature of minus sixty degrees at noon. Another . . .

Ultimately, one turned up which looked plausible. It was the third-orbit planet of a Type G sun. It was not unduly remote from Lanke. It was listed under the name Delhi. Shallow, marshy seas. A single continent. Temperature, not unbearable. Life-types not unduly dangerous. Atmosphere typical of third-orbit planets but with .04% of a complex methane-derivative gas, apparently harmless. This data had been sent up from an exploring spaceboat, later lost. There were what was believed to be the ruins of a human settlement, photographed from space. Classed as habitability zero because no ship had ever returned to its home spaceport after landing on it. The inimical factor was assumed to exist in the atmosphere, but was not known.

Here was material for guesses, but nothing more. It threw no light on where the dead man with bad teeth had come from. Calhoun went over all the other reports. No other was even as promising as this.

He had been seven hours in overdrive when the projected letters separated into twins. Every letter doubled. The reading-matter became unreadable. With one eye covered, reading was just barely possible, but he could see nothing with real clarity.

He took his temperature. He felt perfectly well, but he had a high fever and his eyes grew progressively worse. He said grimly to Murgatroyd, "I begin to see some excuse for the doctors on Lanke. Whatever they were afraid of getting, I've got. It's highly infectious, all right!"

Ten hours out from Lanke, his vision cleared again. He could fuse the images from both eyes. He continued to feel perfectly well, but his temperature was half a degree higher than three hours earlier.

"This," he told Murgatroyd, "is not according to the rules! I may have to call on you as a member of the medical profession!"

He gave himself as thorough a physical examination as one can give himself. He used the amplifier-microscope on his saliva, his blood, on every body fluid. Each of them showed a minute, perfectly spherical pigmented microorganism in appalling numbers. As he regarded them on the screen of the amplifier-microscope they broke into halves, became small spheres, grew swiftly and prepared to divide again. Meanwhile, they danced and darted and whirled frantically. The reaction to the Daflos reagents indicated the presence of a deadly toxin.

"And I took precautions!" Calhoun said rather dizzily. "I washed and showered. I could almost have operated with no more attempt at a sterile environment!" He shook his head. "I think I can go a little longer. That dead man was farther along than this. I've time enough to call on you, Murgatroyd."

He looked at himself in the mirror. The curious enlargement of the flesh beside his nose had appeared. He began to get out his equipment. Something occurred to him.

"The Health Minister," he said sardonically, "didn't quarantine me. He sent me off. He had no fear of my reporting anything to headquarters! I should be dead before breakout, and you couldn't run the ship to headquarters and it would never be found." Then he said, "Let's prevent such an unpleasant fate, Murgatroyd!"

He drew a small sample of blood from his arm. He injected it into Murgatroyd where a small patch of skin on the tormal's flank had been desensitized almost as soon as he was born. Murgatroyd made no objection.

Now Murgatroyd went back to his cubbyhole, yawning. He crawled in to doze. Calhoun made a mental note to check his pulse and breathing in half an hour. He himself, felt feverish. His head seemed to rock a little. His eyes went bad again. He saw double. Murgatroyd dozed peacefully. Calhoun doggedly waited for him to react to the microscopic spheres. His heartbeat should go up four or five counts a minute. He might run a degree of fever. He would be sleepy for two hours, or three, or even four. Then he'd wake up and his blood would contain antibodies against the material with which he'd been inoculated. He'd be back in robust health, and able to share it with Calhoun.

It didn't work out that way. When Calhoun went to check his pulse-rate in half an hour, Murgatroyd came wide awake. He said, "Chee!" in an inquiring tone. He scrambled out of his nest, filled with vim and zest for whatever the hour might bright forth. His pulse was normal. His temperature was equally correct.

Calhoun stared at him. Murgatroyd couldn't have looked healthier. He showed no sign of having needed to produce antibodies.

He hadn't. There are some diseases, contagious among animals, to which human beings are immune. There are some from which humans suffer, to which animals are not subject. More than once medical research has been halted while a hunt was made for an experimental animal in which a particular strain of microbes or viruses could live.

The plague of which Lanke was terrified and Calhoun a victim happened to be a plague to which Murgatroyd did not need to form antibodies. He was immune to it by the simple normal chemistry of his body, and there was nothing that Calhoun could do about it. He considered that he would unquestionably die within a certain short number of days or hours. The Med Ship would drive on, to breakout somewhere within a light-year more or less of its destination. From there, it should make a shorter overdrive-hop to a matter or no more than a million miles or two, and then it should use Lawlor Drive within the solar system, on whose planet the Interstellar Medical Service had its headquarters.

But if Calhoun was dead nothing of the sort would happen. The Med Ship would breakout. Murgatroyd might still be alive, but he could do nothing. Eventually he would die, bewildered. The Med Ship would never, never be found so long as time ran on, and Lanke . . .

"Murgatroyd," said Calhoun, "this is a bad business! And you're right in it! I know what I'm up against, but what am I going to do for you?"

Murgatroyd said confidently, "Chee-chee-chee!"

"I'm seeing better," said Calhoun suddenly. "It seems to come in waves of better and worse. Intermittent."

He put his hand to his face to feel the now-marked unresilient stiffened flesh beside his nose. Murgatroyd looked hopefully at the coffee pot. He said, "Chee?" There was nothing to indicate the possibility of anything, not anticipated. There was no reason for anything to happen.

Then, abruptly, everything changed. The Aesclipus Twenty was in overdrive and there was only one thing which even in theory could affect her from outside. It was said that if a ship were in overdrive and all the cosmos exploded, and everything in all the galaxies ceased to be, including the galaxies themselves, that people in a ship in overdrive would not know of the disaster and would not hear the last trumpet until breakout-time came.

But now, here at this moment, Calhoun felt a familiar and monstrous dizziness, and an equally familiar and intolerable nausea, and then all the sensations of a whirling, spinning fall toward nothingness. Simultaneously the little ship's vision screens lighted, the Aesclipus Twenty broke out of overdrive and lay floating in space surrounded by a myriad of stars, and a small but bright red light flashed luridly on the control-board.

II

Murgatroyd made the first comment. It was an indignant, protesting, "Chee-chee! Chee-chee!"

He was accustomed to the sensations of going into overdrive and out of it again. He didn't like them. Nobody did. Murgatroyd endured them for the sake of being where Calhoun was, being petted by Calhoun, drinking coffee with Calhoun, and on occasion engaging in long, leisurely discussion to which Murgatroyd contributed his shrill voice and stubborn conviction that he was actually conversing. Now, though, he protested. Before breakout there was normally an hour-off warning, then a five-minute warning, and then a solemn tick-tock-tick-tock until a gong sounded and then a voice counted down to zero. Murgatroyd had learned that this was the routine for breakout; but just now the extremely unpleasant sensations had happened with no warning whatever. It was upsetting. It was a violation of the accepted order of things. He said, "Chee-chee! Chee-chee!" even more indignantly.

Calhoun stared at the star-speckled screens. He was entirely incredulous. The red light on the control-board was notice of something solid nearby in space. But that was impossible! The Med Ship was in between-the-stars, light-years from Lanke. In between-the-stars there is nothing more solid than starlight. Solidity in this emptiness would be even more unlikely than a ship breaking out of overdrive strictly on its own decision. However, the limit of improbability was reached when not only a ship broke out of itself, but the near-object warning flashed simultaneously.

Calhoun stared at the screens. It didn't make sense, unless a highly theoretic happening had occurred. In theory, two overdrive fields might affect each other. Nothing else could. For extremely abstract reasons, it had been determined that if two ships passed close to each other, and if they were of nearly the same size, and if both overdrive-fields units were nearly of the same strength, either or both fields could blow out. For this reason a circuit-breaker was included in all overdrive designs. The odds against such a thing were ten plus a handful of zeros to one. It had never before been known to happen. Now it had.

Calhoun slipped into the pilot's chair. He threw switches. Overdrive off. It had gone off by itself. Circuit-checker on. A special instrument verified all contacts and connections. This instrument stuttered for an instant and then flashed the signal, "Go." A circuit-breaker had operated, but it was now reset. It was the one in the overdrive circuit. Calhoun barely noticed that the G.C. speaker had come on also and now relayed the crackling and hissing noises that would-be poets call, "the small-talk of the stars." Calhoun found himself gazing unbelievingly at the screens.

A second-magnitude star winked out and back to brightness. A less brilliant nearby star followed. Calhoun swung the radar and looked incredulously at what it reported. There was something in between-the-stars no more than four hundred miles away. With hundreds of thousands of cubic light-years of space to move about in, something in overdrive had passed within four hundreds miles of Aesclipus Twenty. Two circuit-breakers had operated, and—there they were! The radar blip said the other object was a trifle smaller than the Med Ship, and it appeared to be practically motionless, moving only enough to occult two nearby stars within a few seconds.

Murgatroyd said yet again, and even more indignantly, "Chee!! Chee!!!"

"I didn't do it, Murgatroyd," said Calhoun abstractly. "Quiet for a minute!"

He threw another switch and the electron-telescope came on. He searched with it. He made fine adjustments for focus. Then his face expressed blank unbelief.

The telescope screen showed another ship floating in the starlight. It was not much like any other ship Calhoun had ever seen. At first it seemed a freak; not alien but eccentric, not of a non-human design, but like something made by men who'd never seen a real spaceship. There was a pipelike object sticking out of its bow.

He pressed the G.C. call-button; but first he cut off the lens that would transmit a picture of himself. He called.

"General Call!" he snapped. "General Call! Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty making general call! What ship's that?"

There was no answer. He frowned. Only minutes since he'd discovered himself very definitely condemned to death by an unfamiliar plague germ. A little earlier he'd been thrown off the planet Lanke for discovering too much. Before that he'd seen a dead man who couldn't come from anywhere. This extremely unusual ship couldn't come from anywhere, either.

He suddenly heard murmuring voices. There seemed to be several persons speaking in low tones near an open microphone. They were in disagreement. One voice raised itself above the others but the words were still indistinct.

"Hello!" said Calhoun sharply. "I hear your voices! Who the devil are you and what's going on?"

It occurred to him as odd that, with a plague on him and the end of all his responsibilities drawing near, he still spoke authoritatively as a Med Service man and a citizen of the galaxy to persons whose actions required to be explained. He repeated sternly, "What's going on?"

The other ship was incredible. It was patched with patches on top of patches. It was preposterous. The electron telescope could not give the finer details in mere starlight, but it was rusty and misshapen and no spaceport would ever lift it off the ground! Yet here it was.

A voice rasped from the G.C. speaker overhead, "Look! What do you think you're doing?" As Calhoun blinked, it said pugnaciously, "What d'you think you're doing to us? You . . . know what I mean!"

Calhoun said coldly, "This is Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty. Who are you?"

"Med Ship?" snapped the angry voice, "wha—"

The voice stopped abruptly, as if a hand had been clapped over someone's mouth. There were more murmurings.

Calhoun grimaced. He didn't understand this other ship. He'd cut off his own vision lens because he didn't want anybody to see him with the marks of the plague on him. Whoever spoke from the patched-up other spacecraft didn't want to be seen, either. The murmurings came to an end. The harsh voice snapped, "Never mind that! What'd you do to us? We were going about our business when—whango! Something hit us. And we're here instead of where we were going! What'd you do?"

Calhoun saw a stirring of the radar blip. The other craft was moving toward the Med Ship. Then he felt the edges of everything becoming twinned. His eyes were going bad again. No, he didn't want to mention his own situation. Nothing could be done for him, and dying is a strictly private matter. He felt concern for Murgatroyd, but he was a Med Ship man and there was a certain way he should act. He was impatient. Whoever was piloting the other ship knew nothing about his work. Calhoun felt the indignation of a professional with an inept amateur.

The rasping voice said truculently, "I'm asking what you did!"

"We did something to each other," said Calhoun coldly. "We came too close to each other. Our overdrive units got overloaded. Our circuit-breakers cut them off. Do you want more information than that?"

"What other information have you got?" demanded the voice.

Calhoun felt feverish. The symptoms of this plague were evidently intermittent. They came and they went. They'd probably grow more and more severe until he died of them—but . . .

"I take it," he said coldly, "that you don't know what you're doing or why, because you don't know what's happened. Do you know where you are, or how to get to where you want to go? In other words, do you want help?"

"What kind of help?" The question was asked with suspicion.

"First off," said Calhoun, "you broke out of overdrive. Have you checked your circuit-breaker?"

"We don't call it that," said the voice. "What is it?"

Calhoun could have sworn. Instead, he closed his eyes. He felt a diminishing of his sense of balance. He was annoyed at the prospective loss of dignity, but he said, "A circuit-breaker . . ." Then with his eyes closed he told what a circuit-breaker was, and where it would be in a power line. There should be an indicator saying, "Off." There had to be a circuit-breaker or the other ship would be full of smoke from burned-out insulation.

It occurred to him how the other ship came to be what it was. It was a salvage job. It had been found somewhere and cobbled back to precarious operation by men who had to guess at the functions of what they repaired. They'd lifted off to space with it, probably by rocket. It was hair-raising to think of!

All he could do was give them advice and possibly a course in drive-time so they wouldn't over-shoot, for now . . .

"When you find the circuit-breaker, turn off the overdrive switch in the control-board," he said. "Then—not before!—throw the circuit-breaker back on. Then you can go into overdrive again. How about your fuel? This is a repaired spaceboat, isn't it?"

A strained silence, and then a suspicious assent.

Calhoun had them report on the fuel, the air-pressure and the air-renewal apparatus. His sense of balance began to come back. He called for more and more instrument readings.

"You haven't too much fuel," he said briefly, "but you can get to a nearby spaceport. That's all! Where do you want to go?"

"That's our business!"

"You've only so many possible destinations," Calhoun told them. "Wait a minute."

He worked the computer and the data-retrieval device. He got courses from here to the nearest inhabited planets. There were four that they could reach handily. Calhoun named them and the time in overdrive required to get reasonably close to them—to a distance the Lawlor drive could traverse in a practicable interval. . . . One of the four was Lanke, and Calhoun frankly advised against taking the agglomeration of patches that was a ship to Lanke. His reason was the considerable likelihood that there was plague on Lanke now.

"I've written down the courses and drive-times," he observed. "Write them down as I dictate."

He dictated them. Murmurings. Discussion in the background of the other spacecraft. The harsh voice said, "Those drive-times are pretty long. There's a yellow sun that looks close."

"It's Delhi," said Calhoun, from memory. "It has an Earth-type planet and there may have been a colony on it once. But there's nothing there now! There's something wrong with it and no ship is known to have gotten back to its home spaceport after landing on it." He added conscientiously, "It's near enough. The drive-time's only—" He gave the drive-time and the course. "But I advise you to go to one of the other nearby worlds, go into orbit around it, and call down. They'll land you somewhere. And when they get you down to ground, stay there!"

His eyes were better. He looked at the screens. The freakish, patched-up boat was very, very close, not more than a score or two of miles away. He opened his mouth to protest indignantly. He was practically a dead man. At the moment, to be sure, he felt only feverish. Otherwise, nothing serious seemed to be wrong. However, he knew that a mirror would show his own self with the plague marks he'd seen on a dead man back on Lanke.

"Meanwhile," he added, "you'd better not come closer to me."

There was no answer. There were, though, murmurings near the microphone in the other ship. Someone protested against something. The rasping voice growled. There was a click, and the murmuring stopped. The other microphone had been cut off.

Calhoun's eyes improved still more. He looked at the electron telescope image of the other ship. It was turning to face him directly, the pipe at its bow bore exactly.

Suddenly, there was a mad, violent swirling of vapor or gases from the tube at the other ship's bow. Emptiness snatched at it, grasped it, separated it to atoms and threw them away.

The Med Ship was alone. Something minute remained where the preposterous other spacecraft had been. It was very, very small. It was only a moving speck of reflected starlight. Then the electron telescope screen showed it clearly. It was bright metal, it was torpedo-shaped, and it moved with a certain high, fixed velocity toward the Aesclipus Twenty.

Calhoun stared at it. He knew at once what it was, of course, but his reaction was modified by the situation he found himself in. Normally, he'd have been angered by the sending of a missile, probably charged with chemical explosive, to destroy the Med Ship after the attacking vessel had vanished in overdrive. He was acutely aware that he happened to be in one of the remission-periods of the plague which undoubtedly would kill him. If he'd thought of the future as one usually does, he'd have been angry that somebody had tried to destroy him. Now he had no future to be robbed of. If this shell shattered the Med Ship, it wouldn't be doing very much. It would deprive him of one—two—maybe three days of vanishing satisfactions, in which he could accomplish nothing whatever.

It didn't seem to matter. He found himself smiling wryly at the thing that came swiftly to destroy him. Suddenly, he changed his mind. He threw the Lawlor-drive switch and the Med Ship moved. When the explosive missile passed through the spot the ship had occupied, and went sturdily on and on to nowhere, he grimaced a little.

"I dodged that on your account," he told Murgatroyd. "But for you, I'd have no reason to bother. I can't live to reach headquarters, though with warning they could receive me without danger and soothe my final hours. I can't land on a nearer, colonized planet without introducing a plague and being a murderer. So I'll compromise and put you down where you just barely may have a sporting chance of surviving—where if you die, it won't be by starving in this ship. I'll do whatever futile things my condition permits."

He began to set up a course and drive-time on the ship's automatic pilot. A little later he said, "Overdrive coming, Murgatroyd!"

There came the intolerable accompaniments of going into overdrive. Vertigo and nausea and all the sensations of an unconscionable, spinning plunge toward oblivion. Calhoun endured them doggedly. He was convinced that presently his eyes wouldn't work again and he'd probably have to crawl to move about on the ship. Anticipation of such undignified behavior was much more annoying than a mere attempt to kill him. He didn't bother to be angry about the missile.

While he felt relatively himself, he readied a meal for Murgatroyd and ate what he could, himself. He viewed with a certain detached amusement the idea that since he couldn't live to reach headquarters, and couldn't land anywhere else without introducing the plague, he was using all the splendid technical equipment of a Med Ship, representing tens of millions of credits and the life achievements of many scientists and inventors, to put a small furry creature aground on an uninhabited world rather than leave him alone in an undirected spaceship.

"This," he told Murgatroyd while the little tormal zestfully ate the food he'd set out, "this is ridiculous! You'll be left alone anyhow and I've no idea how you'll make out—but . . ."

He shrugged. It would be absurd to make a dramatic production out of the business of dying.

"I'm going to put you aground and you'll have to fend for yourself. You'll probably think I'm unkind. You can't imagine my being unable to take care of you. But that's the fact. It's typical. I haven't done anything in particular."

Murgatroyd said cheerfully, "Chee-chee!" and finished his plate.

The Aesclipus Twenty drove on. Presently, Calhoun's eyes went bad again. Later, he lost all ability to distinguish up from down, or sidewise from either. He sat grimly in the pilot's chair, with a cord knotted to keep him from falling out, which for some reason he considered necessary.

He probably slept. He waked, and he was horribly thirsty. He loosened the cord and let himself fall to the floor. With all his senses assuring him that the ship revolved, he made his way on all-fours—with several falls—to where there was drinking water. He drew a glass, and then solemnly poured it out on the way to his lips, which were responsive to the feeling that he had to turn the glass to prevent it from spilling as the Med Ship turned; but the ship didn't turn and the water was wasted.

Finally, he wedged himself against the wall and refused to believe anything but his eyes. He watched the surface of the water and denied all other evidence. He drank. He drank again and again and again.

Abruptly, he slept. Then he awoke, and acute nausea was just past, but dizziness had not woken him, and the feeling of spinning fall was only slightly different from the feelings he had all along. Now, Murgatroyd was plucking at him and chattering agitatedly, "Chee! Chee-chee! Chee!"

Then he knew that breakout had come, and the vision screens were lighted, and he looked and saw a blazing yellow sun and innumerable stars. The ceiling speaker crackled and whispered as in normal space. The Med Ship had arrived at the solar system of Delhi.

When he was back in the pilot's chair, Calhoun realized how weak he'd become; obviously, the effect of the plague nearing its terminal stage. He heard somebody talking. It was himself, and he paid no attention. He searched for the planet, the planet that was of no use to anybody, from which no ship returned. He found it. It was astonishingly near. One part of his brain labored gravely with the computer and inexpertly made observations while another part talked nonsense, which he resented.

There followed a period of very great confusion. There seemed to be two of him, as there appeared to be two Murgatroyds and two electron telescope screens and two control-boards. One part of his mind considered this improper, but another part gleefully took note that he had two right hands and two lefts, and watched with charmed attention as those hands simultaneously operated twin controls, and something gigantic grew more immense as the Aesclipus Twenty approached it. He was absurdly surprised when it became a monstrous black hole in the universe of stars. The Med Ship had swung around to its night-side in an orbit Calhoun's then-disregarded sane brain-fraction had contrived. He seemed to sleep, and to wake again, and he was extremely thirsty. Suddenly, the sane part of his mind declared loudly, that there was a settlement! It showed on the electron telescope screen! Then the part of his brain that was angry with the fevered part forcibly took charge.

The confusion he experienced did not lessen, to be sure. The part of a man which is his total consciousness, the part that uses brain-cells to store memories and present data for judgment, the part that uses brain-cells to control his body, the part which recognizes the phenomena of consciousness, that part, still functioned. One's brain can become an unreliable instrument, from fever or alcohol, but there is an ego, an id, a something, which struggles to make sane use of it. There were moments when he knew that he was singing and that his body was behaving in a fashion totally irrelevant to his situation and his purpose. There were other moments when he seemed to control his body which was astonishingly feeble, and he was clearly aware that he had turned on the Med Ship's emergency rockets and that it was balancing on a pencil-thin, blue-white flame in midair.

Confusion came again. He was lecturing Murgatroyd on medical ethics. While he lectured, the Med Ship and all its contents turned somersaults, as did the planet outside. Calhoun knew that proper planets do not turn somersaults in their own skies, so he treated this behavior with the dignified contempt it deserved.

More chaotic sensations, so bewildering that they ceased to be impressions. Suddenly, there was a distinct thump, and he was shocked into rationality. He realized that the Med Ship had touched ground. He had cut off the rockets. He stared at the scene the vision screen showed.

The Aesclipus Twenty had landed in a swampy valley bottom among low mountains; there was vegetation outside which swayed gently in a strong breeze. On higher ground he saw white, man-made walls with empty window openings and tree tops showing where there should have been roofs. Close to the Med Ship there was swamp, marsh, stagnant puddles, and indigenous growing things.

Murgatroyd said, "Chee-chee!" in an anxious tone. Calhoun was weary beyond belief, but he roused.

"All right, Murgatroyd," he said dizzily, "I've done a very silly thing, and maybe I've done you no good at all, but if you'll follow me I'll finish it."

With an overwhelming lassitude, making his arms and legs seem to weigh tons, he left the chair by the control-board. He stayed on his feet almost half the way to the air-lock, by leaning heavily against the wall. Then his knees buckled under him and the rest of the way he crawled. At the inner air-lock door he reached up and by pure habit pushed the succession of buttons which opened both the inner and the outer doors. They rumbled wide, unsealing themselves. Air came in. There was the smell of mud and vegetation and unfamiliar life. There was also one particular odor which should have been unpleasing, but that it was so faint it seemed only strange.

"There!" said Calhoun. He waved his hand feebly. "There you are, Murgatroyd! There's a world for you. You'll be lonely, and maybe you'll die or be killed by some local predator, and maybe I'm doing you a dirty trick. But my intentions are of the best. Shoo! Get out so I can close the ports again."

Murgatroyd said, "Chee!" in a bewildered tone. It was not customary for Calhoun to crawl on his hands and knees and urge him out the air-lock. Calhoun was behaving strangely. Murgatroyd looked at him apprehensively.

"Chee!" he said. "Chee-chee!"

Calhoun did not answer. He felt himself slipping down to the Med Ship's floor. He was intolerably weary and weak. He was wholly confused. The sane part of his consciousness relaxed. He'd finished the task he'd set himself. If he rested, maybe he'd get back enough strength to close the air-lock door. It didn't really matter. It was annoying that he hadn't been able to get word of the Lanke situation to headquarters, but the plague had been on Lanke before. The doctors knew it. They were terrified by it, but maybe . . . maybe . . .

Wryly, at the moment he believed his moment of death, Calhoun conceded to himself that he'd done the best he could. It wasn't good enough.

III

When Calhoun awoke, or at any rate regained consciousness, Murgatroyd was saying, "Chee-chee! Chee-chee!" in his high-pitched voice. He sounded unhappy. There were smells in the air. Calhoun was not on the floor, but in his bunk. He heard footsteps and the sound of wind blowing. There were cracklings which were the sounds of the G.C. speaker reporting normal shortwave broadcasts from a nearby sun. There were other and unidentifiable sounds.

Calhoun opened his eyes. This instant, instinctive effort to sit up achieved nothing whatever. He was almost wholly without strength. He did manage to make a croaking sound, and someone came to the door of his sleeping cabin. He didn't even see clearly, just now, but he said in a fretful tone and with extreme exertion, "This is the devil! I've got a plague of some kind, and it's horribly infectious. You've got to set up some sort of quarantine around me. Get a doctor to the air-lock—don't let him come in!—I'll tell him about it."

A voice—a girl's voice—said evenly, "That's all right. We know about the plague. This is Delhi. We should know, shouldn't we?"

Murgatroyd hopped up on the bunk on which Calhoun inexplicably lay. He said agitatedly, "Chee! Chee-chee!"

Calhoun found his voice improved. He said as fretfully as before, "No doubt. No doubt. But—this is the devil!"

A surpassing bitterness filled him. There were people here where he'd landed. Inhabitants. He was a Med Ship man and he'd brought plague here! Quite automatically, he assumed that in some moment of unrealized confusion he must have set up the wrong course and drive-time in the Med Ship's automatic-pilot. He'd had four courses and timings at hand to give to the other ship encountered in space. He must blindly have used the wrong one when setting course for Delhi . . .

The girl's voice had said this was Delhi. But it couldn't be! No ship had ever gotten home from Delhi. It couldn't be colonized. It had been tried, and there were ruins to prove it, but there was something wrong with it, something yet unknown but utterly fatal. No ship had ever returned . . .

He couldn't stop to think of such things now. He'd brought plague here!

"Get a doctor to the air-lock door," he commanded as fiercely as his weakness would allow. "Quick! I've got to tell him . . ."

"We haven't any doctors," said the girl's voice, as evenly as before, "and you don't need one. This is Delhi. There's no use in having doctors on Delhi. Not for the plague. You're all right!"

He saw, with clearing eyes, that a figure bent over him. It was a girl with dark brown eyes. She lifted his head and gave him a drink from a cup.

"We heard your rockets, Rob and I," she said in a tone from which all warmth had been removed. "We could tell you were landing. We hurried, and we got here before anybody else. We found you halfway out of the air-lock with a tame little animal crying to you to wake up. So we brought you inside and Rob's watching now to see if anybody else heard you land. You can hope nobody did."

Calhoun decided that he was delirious again. He struggled to clear his brain. Murgatroyd said anxiously, "Chee-chee?"

"I suppose so," said Calhoun drearily. Then he said more loudly, "There has to be a quarantine! I'm carrying contagion . . ."

The girl did not answer. Murgatroyd chattered at him. It sounded as if, relieved now, he were scolding Calhoun for not having paid attention to him before.

Calhoun fell, tumbled, dropped, back into slumber.

It was a very deep sleep. A dreamless sleep. He came out of it an indefinite time later, when he could not tell whether it was day or night. There was silence, now, except for the tiny background noises from the tape. The air-lock door was evidently closed. Murgatroyd was a warm spot touching Calhoun's leg through the bed covering. Calhoun noted that his brain was clear. His fever was gone. Which could mean either that it was burned out, or that he was. In the latter case, he was experiencing that clear-headedness sometimes granted to people just about to die.

He heard a peculiar small sound. Someone—a girl—was weeping while trying not to make a noise. Calhoun blinked. He must have moved in some other fashion too, because Murgatroyd waked instantly and asked, "Chee-chee? Chee-chee-chee?"

There was a stirring in the control-room. The girl who'd given him a drink came in. She looked as if she'd been crying; Calhoun said, "I feel very much better. Thanks. Can you tell me where I am and what's happened?"

The girl tried to smile, not very successfully. She said, "You're on Delhi, to stay. We've locked the air-lock doors and nobody can get in. They've only banged and called, so far. Rob's looking over the ship now, trying to find out how to smash it so it can't possibly be repaired. He says you can't lift anyhow. The ground here is swamp. Your landing-feet have sunk in the mud and you can't possibly get clear. So that's all right for the time being."

Calhoun stared at her. He ignored the statement that the Med Ship was permanently aground.

"Delhi—locked doors—" He said incredulously, "Look! Delhi's not inhabited. Its air's wrong, or something. No ship that's ever landed on Delhi has ever gotten home again. Delhi doesn't have people . . ."

"There are a good two thousand of them outside just now," said the girl as detachedly as before. "And every one of them will tear this ship apart with his bare hands rather than let you leave without taking them. But the swamp has taken care of that." Then she said abruptly, "I'll get you something to eat."

She went out and Calhoun groped for meaning in this addition to the improbabilities that had started on Lanke. They'd begun with a dead man who apparently came from nowhere, and the terror he evoked in the medical profession of Lanke. There'd been the plague Calhoun contracted from the most cursory examinations of that dead man, and the patched-up life-boat quite impossibly encountered in space. It also couldn't have come from anywhere. Above all there was the plague, which on Lanke was horribly dreaded, but which this girl disregarded. Now there were two thousand inhabitants on the uninhabited planet Delhi who wouldn't let the ship leave without them, and there was somebody—his name was Rob?—who intended to wreck the Med Ship so it couldn't leave at all.

The sum of all this was bewilderment. For example, the plague. He didn't have it anymore. It was a spontaneous recovery. If its victims recovered, why the terror on Lanke? Also, why were there two thousand people who wanted to leave Delhi, and somebody named Rob who didn't want anybody to leave—not even Calhoun?

He puzzled furiously while he waited for the girl to return. He heard movements. Somebody came up into the control-room from the storage decks below. He heard voices. If that was Rob, he'd reason to be uneasy. He called. A tall, broad young man of about his own age looked in the door.

"You're Rob," said Calhoun politely. His voice was stronger than he'd expected. "Would you mind telling me why you want to wreck my ship? I'm told that it's hopelessly bogged down in marshy ground now. Why add to the disaster by wrecking it?"

"Enough men," said the young man, with some grimness, "could dig it out. And then it could go away. That has to be made impossible!"

"But this is a Med Ship!" protested Calhoun. "It has a special status!"

"And this is Delhi," said Rob sternly. "There's a plague that's native to this planet. We who live here don't have it. If someone comes here with it, he recovers. But if we leave, we develop it, and if anyone from here landed on another world, he'd die of it with the people he took it to. So nobody must leave!"

Calhoun considered for a moment.

"But somebody has, not long ago. In fact, I caught the plague from him."

He couldn't have proved the connection of the dead man on Lanke with the freakish spaceship and that with Delhi, but he believed the connection was there. The man named Rob proved it by grinding his teeth.

"A crime!" he said fiercely. "And maybe we'll be bombed for it! It's another reason this ship has to be wrecked. We're quarantined. We have to be! The quarantine mustn't be broken!"

Calhoun considered again. There were people on Delhi, not less than two thousand of them, who would seize this ship if they could, take aboard as many as could crowd into it, and go on to other worlds where—obviously—they did not believe the plague would appear. On the other hand, there were people who knew that they'd die of the plague if they ever landed on any other world, and the plague would spread from them. The two views were contradictory, and Calhoun was for the moment in between them. He was sure the plague could be spread, though. He'd caught it. Those who wanted to risk everything to leave Delhi and escape whatever they hated here, they wouldn't listen to argument or listen to evidence. Such states of mind are standard with a certain proportion of any population.

Calhoun rubbed his nose reflectively. "This plague and this quarantine hasn't been reported to the Med Service," he observed. "When did it start, and why?"

"Delhi's been quarantined since the first ship landed," said Rob, grimly. "A ship came by and sent a lifeboat down to explore. It reported valuable minerals. The ship went back to Lanke—it hadn't landed—for equipment and supplies while the spaceboat explored further. They didn't know about the plague."

"It hadn't appeared?"

"No. The ship went back to Delhi and landed with machinery and supplies. They opened one mine. They built a settlement. They loaded the ship with ore. It went back to Lanke."

He paused dramatically. Calhoun said, "And . . ."

"It never got there! It simply never arrived. Months later an automatic distress-call was picked up from far out beyond the Lanke solar system. A ship went out to investigate. It was the ship from Delhi, floating where it had broken out of overdrive. There was no living creature aboard. Everybody was dead. It was the plague, but they didn't understand. They towed the ship to port and unloaded it; plague spread over the whole planet. They had to burn down cities to get rid of it! Delhi has been quarantined ever since, more than a hundred years."

"The Med Service should have been told," said Calhoun, annoyed. "Something would have been done about it!"

There was a sudden metallic clanging. It was a blow of something heavy against the Med Ship's exterior air-lock door. There was another blow, and another, and another. Rob listened for a moment and shrugged.

"Sometimes," he said, "there's somebody dropped to us by parachute. They have the plague. They recover. They tell us what other worlds are like, now. They don't often get reconciled to staying here."

The clanging continued. The girl came in from the control-room. She said in the same detached voice, "They're trying to break in with sledge-hammers. But some of them are cutting down trees and trimming them." She looked at Calhoun. "We can help you into the other room if you want to see."

Calhoun found himself struggling to rise. The tall man helped him. The girl said, "Rob has one thing wrong. Not all the people who're parachuted down to us have the plague!"

Rob made a deprecating sound. Calhoun began to move toward the cabin door. He was stronger than he'd thought. Once he was up, with the help of Rob on one side and the wall on the other, he made his way into the control-room. Rob helped him into the pilot's chair at the control-board.

He stared at the vision screens. The Aesclipus Twenty had landed in a marshy, meadowlike level space with mountains all around it. He could see the white walls of what had been a settlement on a mountain side, but it was plainly abandoned. There were only walls. Trees grew all the way down into the valley bottom, and men swung axes among them. As he looked, a tree toppled. Others had already been felled. He swung an outside pick-up to look down the Med Ship's side. A brawny, red-headed man was swinging a sledge-hammer against the sealing strip of the door. The impacts rang through the ship. Calhoun could see, too, where the flat parts of the landing-fins had pressed into the soggy soil. They'd sunk a good two yards below the surface and mud had flowed in over them. They were well buried.

"I'd guess," said Calhoun, "that they're cutting down the trees to make shears from which they can swing a battering ram. I doubt that a sledge-hammer can break the air-lock door. But a heavy enough log, swung hard enough, might do it. There are a lot of people here!"

The valley floor was black with human figures. There were at least two thousand of them, staring at the Med Ship, moving about restlessly, or standing in groups on the ground that might support a man, but not a spacecraft standing upright and heavy. Still others labored at the cutting and trimming of trees. There was somehow an air of tenseness, of impassioned feeling among the figures. Calhoun flipped on the outside microphones and the noise they made became audible. There was a growling, hurried murmur of voices. Sometimes, there were shouts. It was not a group of curiosity seekers, here to look at a spaceship come to ground where spaceships never came. It was a mob. It made the sound of a mob.

"Don't they know there's somebody alive in here?" asked Calhoun.

Rob said hesitantly, "I wanted to disable the ship. I thought it might take some time. So when we found they were coming we closed the air-lock and didn't answer the calls or their bangings on the hull. I think they've decided that somebody landed the ship and then died."

The girl said detachedly, "Not long ago they finishing mending a lifeboat that was wrecked here generations ago. They went to Lanke, and they came back. One man didn't return . . . They'd hidden their ship under water. Maybe he couldn't find it after he found what he was looking for. They may think that maybe he managed to steal this ship from the spaceport and has just gotten here. It could have been. He could have been wounded. He could have landed the ship and died."

"Only he didn't," said Calhoun with some dryness. "He didn't get at the spaceport. He developed the plague instead. He gave it to me. And I met the lifeboat, too. I think I was of some service to them."

He didn't mention that for payment the freak spaceboat had fired a missile at the Med Ship. Even that was reasonable as things became clearer. If Delhi was a quarantined world, with not enough of a population to maintain a modern civilization, it would have to go back toward the primitive and the savage. The desperation of its inhabitants would be absolute. It they could manage to cobble a long-wrecked spaceboat so it could take to space, and if because of the plague all nearby planets were its enemies, astronauts from Delhi would feel justified in destroying the Med Ship to keep their secret from becoming known. They'd do it in the hope of going on to a successful breaking of the quarantine that held them on this intolerable world. Yet the plague made that quarantine necessary.

"It must smell pretty bad out there, with all those people moving about," said the girl abruptly.

Calhoun turned his head.

"Why?"

"It's marsh," said the girl. "It smells when it's stirred up. It's strong! They say that on other worlds it isn't bad. Here it is. When new people are parachuted down to us, they hate it. We're used to the regular smell of things, I suppose. We don't notice. But we don't like to stir things up. Then we notice!"

Calhoun said, "Marsh . . . how about water?"

"At worst we boil it," she said evenly. "It isn't as bad, then, as un-boiled. Sometimes we filter it through fresh charcoal. That's better. There's a dam with electric generators that were installed for the mine. Some of us run that to electrolyze water into gases that we burn back together again. The flame destroys the cause of the smell, and then we condense the steam the flame combines to. That's the best, but it's a luxury and we can't afford luxuries." She looked at the vision screen. "There are charcoal breathing-masks for working when you have to stir things up. But making charcoal isn't fun, and it has to be fresh or it doesn't work. There aren't many masks out there. It must be pretty bad."

Calhoun looked at her for long seconds.

"Have you tried my drinking water?"

She shook her head. He made a gesture. She drew water from the spigot by the food-readier. Her expression changed.

"Water tastes like this? All the time?"

She pressed a glass on Rob. He tasted it and handed back the glass.

"That," she said fiercely, "is enough to want to leave Delhi forever! I'll never taste water again without thinking of this!"

Calhoun said suddenly, "You speak of new people parachuted down. Why are they sent here?"

Her lips compressed.

"Some have the plague, not many. A case turns up now and then, they say, leftover infection, maybe, from the plague they had on Lanke . . . from the other planets . . ."

"Yes," said Calhoun. "The other planets! Which ones?"

She named three, besides Lanke. They were the three whose names and courses he'd offered to the cobbled spaceboat he'd encountered in space. They were the three colonized worlds closest to Lanke. If they sent unwilling colonists to Delhi, which they could not ever hope to leave, it was simple enough to understand that the men in the freakish ship wouldn't accept Calhoun's suggestion of them for destinations.

"How'd they get into the picture? It was Lanke that had the plague, wasn't it—and hid it?"

The girl shrugged.

"People were sent here later, from the other planets; they say that the government of Lanke got frightened, years and years ago, that another nearby planet might try to colonize Delhi as they'd tried to do. And it might get the plague, and it might re-infect Lanke. So as a state secret, it told the nearest planets why they mustn't explore Delhi. They checked on it. One of them sent a research team to try to make Delhi usable, because there are minerals here. But they couldn't do anything, and they couldn't go home. So for a while supplies were dropped to them. They lived all right, but they couldn't leave. Presently, it occurred to somebody that Delhi would be a good place to send life prisoners, criminals. So they did. Then they sent political offenders, it was very discreetly done—now . . ."

"Now what?"

"It's said that the crime rate on the four planets is very low," she told him bitterly, "because professional criminals—disappear. It saves the cost of some prisons and guards and the expense of a free criminal class to the others. So we're the sweepings of the four planets. Some of us were accused of having the plague when—we didn't. Naturally, it's all very secret!"

She looked at him defiantly. Calhoun nodded.

"That's quite possible," he admitted. "In any case it would be told, and the people who told it would believe it."

The girl looked at him with angry eyes and compressed lips.

"Some of us," said Rob severely, "accept the facts. We aren't all wrapped up in our own tragedies. Some of us think of our inevitable obligation to humanity at large. So we won't try to leave, and spread the plague!"

Rob frowned portentously. There was friction between these two. The girl clenched her hands. The sledge-hammer struck again, and again, and again. There was likely to be a quarrel between the man and the girl who between them had quite probably saved Calhoun's life. So he said dryly, "Swinging that sledge must be fatiguing. In fact the whole situation outside seems unfortunate. I'll change it."

He moved certain switches. He adjusted a dial. He pressed a button.

A pencil-thin flame shot down from between the Med Ship's landing-fins. It was pure, blue-white incandescence. It was the ship's emergency rocket, on which it had landed and by which it would have to take off again. For an instant the flame splashed out between the fins, and it was so bright that the daylight nearby seemed darkened by contrast. Then the flame bored down. In solid stone the Aesclipus Twenty could melt and boil away bed-rock to a depth of eighty feet. Here, in saturated meadow soil, enormous clouds of steam and smoke arose. Steam-loosened mud flew about. It looked as if the Med Ship squatted on a monstrous arc-flame which was blasting away the marsh on which it rested.

The flame cut off. It had burned for ten seconds or less, developing—under control from the pilot's chair—something less than one-eighth of its maximum power. The ship hadn't stirred.

"I suspect," said Calhoun, "that they think I tried to lift off then and couldn't.. But maybe they'll think I could make a battering-ram crew very uncomfortable, close to the ship as they'd have to work."

He watched the running figures below. There was no longer a crowd gathered about the Med Ship. Those nearest were in headlong flight. The red-headed man who'd been swinging the sledge crashed a way through those fleeing ahead of him. The roar of the rockets had stopped. Some fleeing men began to glance around them as they ran.

Then the mob ceased to flee. It formed a circle three hundred yards across, two thousand human beings facing inward. Some of them shook clenched fists. The outside microphones brought in a babbling, yapping noise that was not great in volume but appalling in the fury it expressed.

"They're not thinking straight," said Calhoun. "There are two thousand of them. Even if they could land somewhere and not die of the plague or carry it, even if they could, how many would this ship carry? How many could its air-renewer supply?" Then he said in a different tone to the girl, "You said that not everybody who's parachuted down to Delhi has the plague. Why else should they be dropped here?"

She said fiercely, "It's a way to get rid of people! It's politics! It's crooked! Anybody can be accused of having the plague. Sometimes they do have it. But sometimes they haven't. My father didn't have it, and he was sent here. Rob's grandfather didn't, and he was too. There are others!"

Calhoun nodded. He said thoughtfully, "That may be true, because there was opportunity for it. But, true or not, people would believe it. And I guess, too, that you tell each other that the plague's worn itself out. Nobody has it here. Nobody who's landed here ever gets it. If they have it when they come, they're cured immediately. I was! So how could they give it to anybody else?"

"Yes!" said the girl passionately. "That's it! How could we? Rob says we have to stay here! Here where the food has no taste, and the water . . . Where we're made nauseated when we plow the ground to grow food! Where . . . Rob says we shouldn't marry and shouldn't have children because they'd be doomed in advance to become savages! He says . . ."

Rob said unhappily, "I think that's true, Elna."

"How could it be true? How could a disease that nobody can have be carried by anybody?"

Calhoun stirred in the pilot's chair.

"I think," he said apologetically, "that I have to get back to my cabin. The plague I had has made me ridiculously weak. But I have to admit, Elna, that I caught the plague from a man who left Delhi and went to Lanke and immediately developed the plague. Rob is right. Nobody must leave Delhi, but me. I have to get some help from Med Service Headquarters. Nobody else must leave. Nobody!"

Rob helped him into his cabin again. He sank gratefully down on his bunk. The girl Elna came in minutes later with another bowl of broth. Her expression was equal parts rebellion and despair. Calhoun was suddenly so sleepy that the spoon fell from his fingers. Rob supported him while Elna fed him, spoonful by spoonful. He was totally asleep the instant she'd finished.

Elna waked him by shaking his shoulder, he didn't know how long afterward. Murgatroyd made shrill protests. Calhoun waked easily and completely, and on the instant he knew that a surprising amount of strength had come back to him. With less than a desperate effort he actually sat up. He swung his feet over the side of the bunk. He became confident that he could walk, if in a wobbly fashion. However, he still wasn't up to rough-and-tumble exercise.

"Rob's gone down," said Elna desperately, "to start smashing up the ship's drive so it can't possibly be repaired!"

"Go tell him," said Calhoun, "that the drive-units from the lifeboat just back from Lanke can be used in this ship. They'll smash the quarantine. Wrecking my drive won't stop them. Anyhow the crowd outside will tear us all to small bits—including you and including Rob—if they break in and find the ship's been smashed after landing. Tell him to come up and I'll give him better instructions."

She searched his face briefly and hurried away. He heard her footsteps clattering down the metal stair to the lower parts of the Med Ship. Murgatroyd said, "Chee?"

"Of course not!" said Calhoun severely. "We are members of the Interstellar Medical Service. We can't let a situation like this keep on! I should be able to stand up, now, and do something about it. Let's try!"

He found a handhold, and with arms and legs working together he got to a standing position. He was still uncertain in his steps, and his expression went wry. Finally, he got across the cabin. He opened a closet and found a robe. He put it on. He made his way unsteadily into the control-room. He opened another cupboard and brought out a blaster, almost a miniature, for the pocket. He adjusted the strength of its bolt and put it out of sight under his robe. He went dizzily to the pilot's seat at the control-board. He threw the G.C. switch.

"General call!" he said into the transmitter. "General call! Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty calling repaired spaceboat or any other ship. General call!"

He waited, blinking at the vision screens. There were still very many people outside. A good proportion seemed to be laboring where the trees of the nearby mountainside ceased to grow because the ground was too marshy for their kind. He saw a disturbance. A chopped through tree trunk fell.

"General call," he repeated patiently. "General call. Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty calling repaired . . ."

A rasping voice interrupted. It was a familiar voice to Calhoun. He'd heard it during that improbable encounter of two ships in between-the-stars. Now it said unpleasantly, "You followed us, eh? What for?"

"Clinical information," said Calhoun. "One man of your crew didn't come back to Delhi with you. He had the plague. In fact, I got it from him. He's dead now, by the way. Why didn't the rest of you get it?"

The voice growled, "What're you asking me for?"

"I'm landed on Delhi, in a swamp," said Calhoun. "It looks like I can't lift off, because I'm mired here. There's a crowd—a mob—outside, trying to contrive a way to break into my ship so they can take it over, dig it out, and lift off for somewhere else. After they break in I'm not likely to get much information. Information like the information that tells me you hid your boat underwater while somebody went to figure out the chances of seizing a ship there by surprise and getting aloft on emergency rockets. That was the idea, wasn't it?"

The harsh voice was very harsh when it demanded, "Who told you that?"

"Never mind," said Calhoun. "But you didn't send only one man. How many?"

A pause. The other voice said cagily, "There were two. But one began to see double and came back."

"Which," Calhoun observed, "was proof that when people from Delhi land on another planet they develop the plague. You'd stopped believing in that. But it was so. It pretty well killed the idea of seizing a ship without warning, picking up a crew on Delhi and moving on to seize yet other ships and break the quarantine to small and quivering bits. Right?"

The voice grated, "What are you driving at?"

"I'd like some cooperation," said Calhoun. "You know you can't work that scheme now! You've promised to break the quarantine by force. Now you're afraid to admit it can't be done. Right?"

"What—are—you—driving—at?" rasped the voice.

"I'm Med Service," said Calhoun. "Tell me what you know about the plague, tell your followers to leave my ship alone and to gather information and biological specimens I ask for. Then we'll have the Med Service taking over as it should have done a hundred years ago. Shortly, there'll be no more plague and no more quarantine."

Silence. What Calhoun proposed was sound sense, but it was not the sort of sound sense that people would accept. The Med Service was not a reality to the people of Delhi, and the quarantine was, and was moreover the deliberate act of the nearby occupied worlds. They were imprisoned on a world which stank, and when its surface was disturbed it reeked, and even drinking water had to be boiled before it could endurably be drank. They could have no modern tools, lest they contrive some way to damage its enemies. They could have no science, because they had to be kept imprisoned. Men will not endure such conditions, necessary or not.

Calhoun said evenly, "I know I'm asking a lot. There's a mob outside my ship now, contriving some way to break into it and seize it, so they can raid a spaceport somewhere and seize other ships to repeat and spread their revolt, and the plague. But you know it won't work. You can leave Delhi a thousand times over, but if you take the plague with you . . . it's no good!"

Silence. Calhoun, waiting, shook his head to himself. Delhi had had a century of isolation and hopelessness, and the arrival of other hopeless prisoners only reminded them of the intolerable nature of the lives they lived. Under such conditions men forget what they don't want to remember, and somehow come to believe everything they wish to be true. They'd developed a blind irrational belief that their imprisonment was unnecessary. They'd developed an unreasoned, impassioned faith in possible escape. They'd rebuilt a shattered spaceboat, learning the functions of the apparatus they rebuilt as they rebuilt it. They'd set out to accomplish the impossible.

Calhoun was asking them to abandon all efforts to help themselves, and depend on a Med Service of which most of them had not even ever heard. They couldn't do it. Especially not with the Aesclipus Twenty aground and needing only to be overwhelmed and then extracted from the marsh for their most desperate needs to be fulfilled. They'd only been told of the plague. They didn't have it. They didn't see it, and they were imprisoned because of it. Few of them really believed in it, as Rob did.

So Calhoun was not surprised when the rasping voice cursed him horribly and cut off communication without bothering to reply. It was a refusal.

His expression was wry as he said to Murgatroyd, "He's a disappointed man, Murgatroyd. That's why he's suspicious and angry. But I'm disappointed too. I think he could have found out things for me that I'll have trouble learning myself."

Extra movement in a vision screen drew his eyes to it. A felled and trimmed tree trunk moved from its place toward the Med Ship. It was carried by not less than fifty men, holding to short ropes passed under it. The people of Delhi had no wheeled vehicles to carry so great a load. If they'd owned them, the marsh would have made them useless. However, they did have arms and muscles. By pure brute strength, sweating in their toil, they brought the log slowly down into the valley. Calhoun had never seen the physical strength of fifty men applied to a single effort. Men used engines or machines for such work. This was like those legendary achievements of barbaric kings and pharaohs. Had they been moving stone, had there been whips cracking to urge them on, he'd have felt that he saw the process of the building of the pyramids on Earth, which were still mentioned in primary grade school texts all over the galaxy.

Then he heard the girl Elna and the man Rob coming up from below. Rob said in icy fury, "You're a woman and I'd have had to hurt you to keep you from interfering. It's because you've been listening to him! He persuaded you, but millions would die if this ship lifted off and went to another world! So I'm going to stop his persuading! Sick or well, if I have to hurt him . . ."

"But, Rob!" protested the girl. "Think, if it's true! Think! If there's a Med Service and if it can end the plague for always, think of us! You wouldn't feel that we mustn't marry. You wouldn't think there should be no children to become savages! And we could be so happy . . ."

Calhoun raised his eyebrows. Murgatroyd said, "Chee!" in what happened to seem a very cynical tone. The heads of the man and girl appeared at the top of the stairwell. Rob's eyes were hot and accusing.

"You!" he cried furiously at sight of Calhoun. "This ship in the hands of the fools outside could mean all the human race wiped out! Don't you see it? Nobody must leave Delhi! Nobody! And as a beginning . . ."

They reached the floor of the control-room. Rob's hands clenched and unclenched. He moved slowly toward Calhoun, glaring in a very dramatic fashion.

"You display a very noble character, Rob," said Calhoun with some irony. "Self-sacrificing, too! It must be very satisfying to feel that way! But I almost agree with you. It's true that nobody must leave Delhi. Nobody but me. If you can't agree to that, we'll have to settle it right now!"

He drew the pocket-blaster from under his robe.

IV

The settlement was necessarily on Calhoun's terms. Calhoun had a weapon. Rob didn't. Calhoun wanted to do something. Rob wanted to keep something from being done. Calhoun was an essentially simple person, inclined to think of objective results in completely matter-of-fact terms. Rob reasoned emotionally, with much attention to noble ideals he was unable to compare with reality. Calhoun considered that he had a job to do. So the matter had to be settled as he decided. Rob had a very fine stock of invective and a splendid equipment of scorn. He made use of both in what he obviously considered an especially fine opportunity for stinging speech. But it was only speech. Calhoun listened unmoved.

"All right," he said presently, with some grimness. "That'll be enough. You've got it off your chest. What do you do now? Play along or sulk over it? I have to leave this place, for Med Headquarters. I need, right now, some mud from the swamp outside for what should be obvious reasons. You can get it. Will you?"

Rob ground his teeth. He refused, eloquently. Calhoun shrugged. Elna said, "I'll get it."

She did, while Rob glowered. It was only a matter of cracking the air-lock door and reaching down with a long ladle, while Calhoun watched the vision screens for signs of mob action. He literally wasn't up to the physical effort of getting a mud sample. There were infuriated shoutings from the mob outside. Men hunted for stones to throw. There weren't any, on the surface of a semi-swamp. Elna brought up a ladleful of black stuff with evil-smelling water on top of it. She silently gave it to Calhoun. He put the mud into a centrifuge to separate the solid matter from the water that saturated it. He sat down, to rest while the centrifuge ran. Rob glared at him in the extremely unhappy state of a man with impassioned convictions he couldn't act on. He was doubtless quite capable of dying for the sake of an abstract humanity. The high drama of such an action would certainly help him do it.

The centrifuge delivered pellets of damp soil and a considerable amount of browning, malodorous water. It had been stirred and—as Elna had mentioned—it smelled very badly. The air in the ship was Delhi air, now, and doubtless it reeked also, but not so strongly that one couldn't get used to it. However, getting used to the smell of stirred swamp water was another matter.

Calhoun roused himself. He filled a culture slide almost full of the unpleasant stuff. He put it in the culture microscope which would let him watch living microbes living. A six-inch screen beside it showed the magnified image. He watched.

Without electronic amplification of the image, it was not possible to watch living microscopic creatures at high magnification. For genuinely high optical power, much light would be required on the slide. Beyond a certain point, that light would be lethal to microbes. But electronic amplification made a sharp, clear image of everything in the culture slide. He saw the equivalent of an amoeba. He noted that it seemed furry. He saw the equivalent of rotifers. They spun madly for a certain time, and then stopped and spun as madly in an opposite direction.

Then he saw the spherical, pigmented microscopic spheres he was looking for.

But these microbes did not dance. They did not fission feverishly. They moved, but very slowly. Doubtless, they did multiply, but Calhoun saw no example of it. Save for lack of activity, though, they were twins of the plague organism.

"Ever hear of ecology, Elna?" asked Calhoun. "I think I'm observing a micro-ecological system at work."

The girl shook her head. She looked at Rob. He sat with his arms grandly folded. Calhoun didn't notice. He said, pleased, "Microbes adjust to their environment, like larger things. And like larger things, their numbers in nature depend on very complicated processes. Small animals multiply fast, because they're eaten by larger things. Larger things multiply slowly, because if they multiply too fast they wipe out their food supply and starve. There are some very curious causes for the limitation of animal populations so they won't all starve to death. If this bug I'm looking at is what I think it may be, it's a most interesting example."

The girl did not seem to hear him. She looked at Rob. He ignored her, with conscious tragic dignity. She'd helped Calhoun.

"Here," said Calhoun, "are what look like plague microbes in their normal Delhian environment. They're sluggish and practically comatose. Phagocytes could take care of an invasion of them into a human body. But here—' He touched a culture bottle in which he had thriving plague microbes growing, cultured from a scrap of a dead man's clothing. "Here I have what may be the same bug in a Lanke environment. The bug is wildly active. It could cause the devil of a plague, on Lanke. I'm going to see what it would do on Delhi."

He looked up for an expression of interest. The girl looked unhappily at Rob. Calhoun stared, and frowned, and shrugged. He took up a pipette which might have been made for the smallest of dolls to use. He introduced dancing, swarming, preposterously proliferating microbes from the Lanke culture into the slide of Delhi swamp water.

Rob said harshly, "They're bringing a log to be a battering ram, since the sledge-hammer didn't work."

Calhoun looked at the outside vision screen. The log was moving slowly across the marshy ground on fifty pairs of feet. It looked like a monstrous creeping insect.

"They're stumbling," said Calhoun. "They can't batter while they're stumbling."

He turned back to the culture microscope. The half-drop of liquid from the pipette had contained thousands and thousands of the dark round microscopic spheres. They showed on the screen now: dancing, swarming, dividing into half-globes and growing back to full spheres again. Their activity was more than feverish. It was frantic.

In minutes it diminished. The dancings and dartings slowed. The infinitesimal objects ceased their headlong multiplication. They became languid. Gradually, they seemed to sleep. Now and again they made trivial, stagnant motions. They were not dead. They were not spores, they were no longer active. Calhoun regarded them with satisfaction. He said, "Ah-h-h!"

It was a most gratifying development. It couldn't have been observed on Lanke, because there was no Delhian material to show it. It couldn't have been seen on Delhi. There were no super-active specimens on Delhi. Only a Med Ship man could have made the observation, with Med Ship equipment. Calhoun looked triumphantly about. Elna still looked unhappily at Rob, and Rob still wore an air compounded equally of fury and of martyrdom.

"Murgatroyd," said Calhoun, "at least you'll be interested! Things are looking up!"

"Chee?" said Murgatroyd.

He padded across the floor and swung up to the lab table unfolded from the wall. Murgatroyd peered at the microscope screen as if it meant something to him. He said, "Chee-chee! Chee-chee!"

"Exactly!" said Calhoun. "This bug is comatose on Delhi, where there is no plague. It's wildly active on Lanke, where there has been, can be, and probably already is plague. We'll return these bugs to a Lanke environment."

He made it, distilled water and a nutrient substance for them to feed on. It was practically the environment of Lanke. He returned the just-made-comatose microbes to the sort of environment in which plague germs throve. These microbes regained all the enthusiasm of multiplication and dancing and—doubtless—the production of deadly toxins they'd shown before.

"Something on Delhi," said Calhoun, "slows down their activity and reduces their breeding rate as something on other worlds keeps the bigger predators from getting too numerous. Something here keeps their numbers down, and that something doesn't, on Lanke. What would you guess, Murgatroyd?"

Murgatroyd said, "Chee!" He moved about the lab table, with a very fine air of someone checking the various bits of equipment there. He picked up a culture slide. He sniffed at it and said, "Chee-chee!" in a very disapproving manner. He dropped it, and swamp water spilled. The odor was actively unpleasant. Murgatroyd sneezed, and retreated from it. He said, "Chee!" and rubbed his nose vigorously.

Calhoun shrugged. He mopped up the spilled half-spoonful. He had visions of living on a world where soil and swamp water stank when disturbed, and where even sea water might do the same. Where one boiled water before drinking it, not to make it germ-free but to drive out most of the taste. Elna had tasted normal water and had told Rob bitterly that she'd never taste water again without remembering how that pure water tasted.

He looked at the vision screens. There were fluffy white clouds in the bluest of blue skies. All oxygen atmosphere planets have blue skies, and those with habitability-one temperatures have winds and jet-streams and storm patterns of strictly standard types. On all the worlds with vegetation there were the equivalents of trees and brushwood and grass. The look of Delhi was not repellent, if one could only get used to the smell of the atmosphere, and not of the soil—if the reek of the swamp was simply an exaggeration of what everything smelled like and one could never fail to notice it . . . the passionate desire of its people to leave it could be understood.

The first log was almost at the Med Ship. A second was on the way. Smaller groups were bringing shorter logs. There were men coming with coils of rope.

Calhoun regarded them detachedly. He saw a man stumble and fall, and get up and be sick because of the stench of the mud he'd disturbed.

Calhoun went back to his work. He set out minute samples of swamp water, and added infinitesimal dosages of reagents to each, and then still more minute quantities of the Lanke environment, frantically active culture. Then a check to see what substance—or what substances made up a group—removed by a reagent would allow the spheres to thrive in swamp water.

It could almost have been predicted that the elaborate setup for research would be useless, and something insanely simple would give the answer. A strip of filter paper, wetted with the active culture and in a stoppered bottle with a trace of swamp fluid, that showed the active culture stopped dead. It did not touch swamp water. It was exposed only to the reekuotee stench, the effluvium of the swamp. Calhoun said, "The devil!" Painstakingly, he repeated the test. He wanted to talk about it, to explain it for his own hearing so that he'd know if his reasoning made sense. He said, "Murgatroyd!"

Murgatroyd said with an air of charmed interest, "Chee?"

"I've got it," said Calhoun. "There is something in the swamp water that slows up the plague germs in multiplying and producing toxin to kill us humans. It's an inhibitive factor like the factors that on different worlds make large carnivores breed slowly, because if they bred fast they'd wipe out their own food supply and die of starvation. In the micro-ecology of germs in Delhi, there's something that holds down plague germs so nobody can get the plague. But on Lanke that inhibitive factor's missing."

Murgatroyd said, "Chee!" and, beady-eyed, watched Calhoun's face.

"I'll bet you a hogshead of coffee to a cookie," said Calhoun exuberantly, "that it's nothing but the smell, the reek, the stink of that—Ha!" He referred to the Stellar Directory. He found Delhi. "Here it is! There's a methane derivative to point oh four percent in the planet's air, about the same as carbon dioxide. Maybe there's a bug in the ocean that produces it. Maybe—oh, anything! There are microbes that can't live where there's oxygen and others that can't live where it isn't. This is a microbe that can just barely live where there's point oh four percent of this stinking stuff. But it goes wild where there's . . . now! You see, Murgatroyd? A ship from here, with Delhi air, could go to Lanke and nobody'd have the plague. But a man from it would develop the plague when he got out into Lanke air which hasn't the methane that holds the plague-germ back. A ship from Lanke that left Delhi without Delhi air in its reserve tanks . . . everybody aboard would die of the plague on the way home. You see?"

Murgatroyd said, "Chee!"

The girl Elna said uneasily, "They're setting up some sort of—thing made out of the logs."

Calhoun looked. There was no battering ram support being erected. There were two short logs upright, and heavy logs crosswise, and a very long log with numerous cross-pieces fastened to it lying in the disturbed ground. Men were working with ropes. It couldn't make an effective battering ram. However, Calhoun was much too elated to give thought to the engineering feat in progress outside. He wanted to verify what was at once plausible and lacking proof. Proof would be finding a highly volatile liquid or a condensable gas in solution in the swamp water. He most definitely had the equipment for seeking it. He used his swamp-water sample recklessly. He did a reduced-pressure fractionating still-run, which could take a full tablespoon full of swamp water and by precise control of the temperature and pressure draw off dissolved air, dissolved carbon dioxide, dissolved . . .

He got enough of a condensable vapor to be visible under the microscope. With the beautifully exact temperature control he had, he found its boiling point by watching that infinitesimal droplet disappear as vapor, and recondense as a fluid as he sent the temperature up and down, watching through a microscope.

Elna said uneasily, "They're getting ready to do something . . .

Calhoun looked at the screen. Men swarmed about an area twenty or thirty feet from the Med Ship's outer plating. They had ropes fastened here and there. They were arranging themselves in long rows about the ropes. There were hundreds of them preparing to do something with the logs. Away over at the edge of the slanting ground, there was much smoke. Men worked at something involving fire. Men shook their fists at the Med Ship, ready to grasp and haul on the ropes they'd brought and placed.

Calhoun blinked. Then he said, "Clever! That's really a beautiful trick! They're sure we can't lift off, so they're going to take the ship with the minimum of damage . . . That's really brilliant!"

Rob said fiercely, "When are you going to start smashing the ship?"

"I've much more important things to do," said Calhoun. "Much more important!"

Almost hilariously, he threw the G.C. switch and began to call: "General call! General call! To repaired lifeboat. Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty calling repaired lifeboat! Top emergency! Come in, repaired lifeboat!"

As he called, he regarded the work outside, which now approached a climax of activity. Men were making sure that ropes lying on the marshy ground were exactly laid to be pulled on. Other men were lining up to haul on those ropes. Leaders arranged them exactly to get the maximum of traction in exactly the proper directions-of-pull. A group of men were bringing something which gave off a thick white smoke. They kept out of the smoke.

"Calling repaired lifeboat! This is urgent! I've found out how the plague works! Calling repaired lifeboat . . ."

A voice said in icy rage, "Well?"

"The plague," said Calhoun, "is a spherical microbe which can't be anything but sluggish in Delhian air, sea, ground, or swamp land, because there's some sort of methane derived compound which inhibits its growth. The compound that makes soil reek when it's disturbed, that you drive out partly when you boil water, that's the stuff that keeps the plague germ inactive. It was in the air you breathed when you kept your boat hidden underwater while two men tried to make it to the spaceport. Do you understand?"

The rasping voice said suspiciously, "What're you telling me for?"

"Because when your two men tried to make it to the spaceport on Lanke, they were breathing air that didn't smell, and didn't hold back the plague germs from multiplying. One man went back when he saw double. Back in your ship the air stopped the germs from multiplying and he got over the plague. When I breathed Delhi air, I got over it. But one man panicked when he found he had the plague. He went to the Health Department and tried to give himself up as a plague victim. He hoped to be carried back to Delhi and to life. But they killed him."

There was a growling sound from the G.C. speaker. Calhoun said, "The Med Service can handle this, but I've got to get to headquarters! There's a mob outside my ship, getting ready to break in. I'll be wrecked! I need somebody to stop the mob from breaking in and wrecking this ship, which is needed to take these facts to Med Service Headquarters. As a matter of common sense, you'd better come here and stop them."

A pause. Then a growled, "We'll be there!"

Calhoun grinned. Murgatroyd said shrilly, "Chee-chee-chee!"

Ordinarily, when Calhoun held conversations over the general communicator phone, it meant that the Med Ship would shortly go aground and people would pet Murgatroyd and feed him sweet cakes and coffee until he almost burst. His small brain made that association again. He began to lick his whiskers and otherwise make himself tidy and irresistible.

Rob said contemptuously, "Are you fool enough to expect him to protect this ship and let you go away in it? He'll never do that! Never!"

"I don't expect him to," said Calhoun mildly. "But he really shouldn't make trips like those to Lanke. It's dangerous! There may be plague on Lanke now, because of it. I expect him to try to get the ship for his own ideas."

"But he's coming . . ."

"Yes," said Calhoun.

He turned to the vision plates again. There were at least eight hundred men lined up beside ropes. There were shoutings and orders and cursings. Under exact instructions, the rope tightened. Men heaved at the ends of the short logs. They rose. They stood up at an angle of forty-five degrees. More shoutings. Enormous, straining efforts . . .

The long log, the heaviest log, the one with the cross-pieces fastened to it, stirred. The shorter logs transferred the flat drag of the ropes to a slanting downward cable, so that the long log went wavering up from the ground. Men with ropes spreading out in every direction balanced it to a sharply vertical position. It stood on end, nearly forty feet long, with cross-pieces by which it could be climbed to its very top.

Now Calhoun observed the spike at its end. It was inches thick and six feet long. It pointed toward the Med Ship. The men with the smoking stuff were halfway across the marsh, now. They kept carefully out of the white vapor the thing they were carrying gave off.

Shoutings, making sure that everything was right.

"What . . ." That was Elna. Rob scowled, but he did not grasp the picture even yet.

The tall pole with the horizontal spike at its end wavered a little, back and forth. A bellowing voice roared . . .

Half the men at the ropes—those that kept the spiked log from falling toward the ship—let go. The other half dragged frantically at the ropes to make it fall on the Med Ship.

It was very well handled. The log crashed into the small ship's plating. The spike went through, as no battering ram could possibly do. Then there were men swarming up the cross-pieces. Those who'd been bringing the smoking stuff ran desperately to arrive at the earliest possible instant. Containers of the strangling white smoke went up.

"Clever!" said Calhoun.

He sniffed. There was an uproar of triumph outside. The citizens of Delhi howled in triumph, and in their movements they stirred up the swampy pools and many were nauseated.

Calhoun sniffed again, and nodded.

"Sulfur," he commented. "They're blowing sulfur smoke in the hole they punched in our hull. In theory, we'll have to open the air-lock doors to get out or strangle. And when we go out they'll come in. Clever!"

The smell of burning sulfur became distinct. It grew strong. Calhoun adjusted a control governing the barometric pressure inside the ship. If by a rise in temperature or for other reasons the pressure in the ship went up, a pump would relieve the extra pressure by compressing it into one of the large air-tanks which carried fourteen times the volume of the Med Ship. Calhoun and Murgatroyd could live for a long time on stored air if the air-renewal system failed.

Now Calhoun had raised the pressure-control. The control called for a pressure of twenty pounds to the square inch instead of fourteen point seven. The tanks poured out vast volumes of air from the reserve-tanks. The pressure inside the ship went up. The sulfur smoke being pumped in the ship turned cold. An icy blast poured out on the sweating men atop the log. The burning sulfur itself was blown about . . .

The men on the log went down. The tumult of outcries outside the Med Ship was a frenzied rage.

Calhoun restored the pressure-control to normal. Elna shivered. The air in the ship was cold.

"What—what happens now?" she asked forlornly. "If you can't lift off . . ."

"I'm waiting for the spaceboat that went to Lanke," said Calhoun. "He's going to come here. Object, to take over the Med Ship."

The ceiling G.C. speaker rasped: "Med Ship! You think you're smart, eh? Come out of that ship and leave the air-lock open or we'll kill you!"

Calhoun said politely, "Hadn't we better talk it over? I really should get to Med Headquarters . . ."

"We've a cannon," said the harsh voice. "If we have to use it—we can rebuild what it breaks. Come out!"

Calhoun did not reply. Instead, he carefully inspected the dials and the switches of the control-board. Rob said savagely, "Here comes the boat! If they fire an explosive shell into us, it'll destroy us!"

"And the Med Ship too," said Calhoun encouragingly. "Which is what you want. But they're not used to gunnery near a planet, which makes straight-line trajectories into parabolas."

He saw the lifeboat, patches on patches, dents and lumps in its hull, the very picture of makeshifts piled on each other to the point of lunacy. It landed, on what must have been a flat place on a mountain-flank. The voice came again, "Come out, leaving the air-lock open, or we kill you!"

Rob said as if reluctantly, "You should let Elna go out before they kill us."

Calhoun said, "I was just waiting for that ship. It really shouldn't go traveling about. Nobody should leave Delhi but me."

"But you're mired! You're stuck here. Your rockets can't lift you."

"I'm not counting on rocket thrust," said Calhoun cheerfully. "I'm going to use steam."

He pressed a button. As had happened once before in this place, a slender blue-white flame appeared under the stern-most part of the Med Ship's hull. It was the emergency rocket, by which the ship had landed. Now the ship was held fast by mud. It would have required a pull or push of many times the Med Ship's weight to break the suction of the mud. The rockets, as rockets, could not conceivably have pushed the spacecraft clear.

But the rocket flame bored deep down into the ground. It vaporized the water beneath it. It volatilized the ground. For eight feet down in the valley bottom's water-saturated soil, the flame bored its way. Steam pressure developed. Steam bubbles of enormous size came up. Steam broke surfaces, heaving up masses of semi-solid valley bottom and escaping at the jagged edges of the cracks between masses. The Med Ship ceased to rest upon an adhesive mass of muck, packed over the feet at the bottom of the landing-fins. The Med Ship actually floated on a mixture of solidities and semi-solidities and steam. It wasn't using the propulsive power of its rockets, at all. It used their steam-generating capacity.

She shot upward before the spaceboat could fire a shell at her. She went up three thousand feet before Calhoun cut down on the rocket power. Then he peered carefully, tilted the ship and let it drop. The valley bottom seemed to leap up. The spaceboat spouted rocket flame. Calhoun dashed at it, seeming to intend a crashing collision in mid-air. He missed it by feet. He swooped and circled and dashed in at it again. The spaceboat dodged frantically.

"I'm doing this in atmosphere," said Calhoun, with an air of apology, "because they made a leak in the hull. I have to take care of the spaceboat. It shouldn't leave Delhi."

The spaceboat fired a cannon-shell. It went completely wild. Calhoun swept in, flipped the Med Ship end for end, and his rocket flame would have cut the spaceboat in two had he swung one of his controls the quarter of an inch. He didn't. Instead he flung the Med Ship about until it was borne in upon the crew of the spaceboat. They had run up against a professional in spacecraft handling. He literally drove the spaceboat down and down and down—and he could have destroyed it a dozen times over—until at the last it made a panicky landing and figures leaped out of it and fled away.

Calhoun made the Med Ship hover above it, fifty feet high, with that deadly star-temperature flame of the rockets drilling through the hull, through the patches, and into the interior.

It was only when flames burst out of cracks and crevices all over the grounded freakish spacecraft that he lifted the Med Ship and headed away over the horizon.

He landed once more on Delhi, some hundreds of miles away on the single continent this planet owned. He was very tired, then. He ordered Rob and Elna out of his ship.

"Nobody should leave Delhi but me," he repeated politely. "So you get out. There'll be a hospital ship here within a week, two at the outside. Are you two going to be married?"

Rob said with dignity, "Not unless the plague is defeated and we can go where we please, not if our children would have to stay on Delhi and gradually become savages."

"I'll send you a wedding present by the hospital ship," promised Calhoun. "You did me a great favor. Thanks."

He closed the air-lock. He looked at a dial. The reserve-tanks of the Med Ship had been emptied, in blowing sulfur smoke out of the single puncture in its hull. He had been pumping them up to normal reserve pressure again, and this was Delhi air. Anybody who got the plague had only to stay in Delhi air and he would be cured. However, there was work for the Med Service to do to arrange that he not relapse when he went out of Delhi air again, nor give the plague to anybody else. There'd be no difficulty about that. The Med Service had solved much more difficult problems.

Calhoun sealed the hull-puncture with a quick-setting plastic. He sealed off the compartment whose wall had been pierced. He went down to the control-room. He blinked as he set the rockets to roaring again and the Med Ship climbed for the sky.

An hour later he was intolerably tired. He aimed the Med Ship for that far-off small star-cluster which was its home. With extra care, because of his weariness, he verified what he'd done. Then he said, "Overdrive coming, Murgatroyd. Five—four—three—two—one."

There was a revolting dizziness and an appalling nausea and then the feeling of a spinning drop to nowhere. Then the Med Ship was in overdrive. It felt solid as a rock. There was no sound but the background tape producing almost inaudible noises of traffic, and rain, and surf, and music, and human voices. There was even faint laughter.

Calhoun yawned.

"Murgatroyd?"

"Chee-chee!" said Murgatroyd shrilly. "Chee?"

"Take over the ship," commanded Calhoun. "If any emergencies turn up, you take care of them. I'm going to bed!"

And he did.