He put the four boxes carefully in the waste-disposal unit. He operated it. The boxes and their contents streamed out to space in the form of metallic and other vapors. Calhoun sat at the control-desk.
"I'm a Med Service man," he said detachedly. "I couldn't cooperate in the spread of plague, anyhow, though a useful epidemic might be another matter. But the important thing right now is not keeping Weald busy with troubles to increase their hatred of Dara. It's getting some food for Dara. And driblets won't help. What's needed is in thousands of tons,—or tens of thousands." Then he said; "Overdrive coming, Murgatroyd! Hold fast!"
The universe vanished. The customary unpleasant sensations accompanied the change. Murgatroyd burped.
[A] Earth's sun, from Earth, is of magnitude roughly minus thirty-six.
CHAPTER 6
A large part of the firmament was blotted out by the blindingly bright half-disk of Weald, as it shone in the sunshine. It had ice-caps at its poles, and there were seas, and the mottled look of land which had that carefully maintained balance of woodland and cultivated areas which was so effective in climate control. The Med Ship floated free, and Calhoun fretfully monitored all the beacon frequencies known to man.
There was relative silence inside the ship. Maril watched Calhoun in a sort of despairing indecision. The four young blueskins still slept, still bound hand and foot upon the control-room floor. Murgatroyd regarded them, and Maril, and Calhoun in turn, and his small and furry forehead wrinkled helplessly.
"They can't have landed what I'm looking for!" protested Calhoun as his search had no result. "They can't. It would be too sensible for them to have done it!"
Murgatroyd said "Chee!" in a subdued voice.
"But where the devil did they put them?" demanded Calhoun. "A polar orbit would be ridiculous! They—" Then he grunted in disgust. "Oh! Of course! Now, where's the landing-grid?"
He worked busily for minutes, checking the position of the Wealdian landing-grid—mapped in the Sector Directory—against the look of continents and seas on the half-disk so plainly visible outside. He found what he wanted. He put on the ship's solar-system drive.
"I wish," he complained to Maril, "I wish I could think straight the first time! And it's so obvious! If you want to put something out in space, and not have it interfere with traffic, in what sort of orbit and at what distance will you put it?"
Maril did not answer.
"Obviously," said Calhoun, "you'll put it as far as possible from the landing-pattern of ships coming in to the space-port. You'll put it on the opposite side of the planet. And you'll want it to stay out of the way, where anybody can know it is at any time of the day or night without having to calculate anything. So you'll put it out in orbit so it will revolve around Weald in exactly one day, neither more or less, and you'll put it above the equator. And then it will remain quite stationary above one spot on the planet, a hundred and eighty degrees longitude away from the landing-grid and directly over the equator."
He scribbled for a moment.
"Which means forty-two thousand miles high, give or take a few hundred, and—here! And I was hunting for it in a close-in orbit!"
He grumbled to himself. He waited while the solar-system drive pushed the Med Ship a quarter of the way around the bright planet below. The sunset line vanished and the planet's disk became a complete circle. Then Calhoun listened to the monitor earphones again, and grunted once more, and changed course, and presently made a noise indicating satisfaction.
Again presently he abandoned instrument-control and peered directly out of a port, handling the solar-system drive with great care. Murgatroyd said depressedly;
"Chee!"
"Stop worrying," commanded Calhoun. "We haven't been challenged, and there is a beacon transmitter at work, just to make sure that nobody bumps into what we're looking for. It's a great help, because we do want to bump,—gently."
Stars swung across the port out of which he looked. Something dark appeared,—and then straight lines and exact curvings. Even Maril, despairing and bewildered as she was, caught sight of something vastly larger than the Med Ship, floating in space. She stared. The Med Ship maneuvered very cautiously. She saw another large object. A third. A fourth. There seemed to be dozens of them.
They were space-ships, huge by comparison with Aesclipus Twenty. They floated as the Med Ship did. They did not drive. They were not in formation. They were not at even distances from each other. They did not point in the same direction. They swung in emptiness like derelicts.
Calhoun jockeyed his small ship with infinite care. Presently there came the gentlest of impacts and then a clanking sound. The appearance out the vision-port became stationary, but still unbelievable. The Med Ship was grappled magnetically to a vast surface of welded metal.
Calhoun relaxed. He opened a wall-panel and brought out a vacuum suit. He began briskly to get it on.
"Things move smoothly," he commented. "We weren't challenged. So it's extremely unlikely that we were spotted. Our friends on the floor ought to begin to come to shortly. And I'm going to find out now whether I'm a hero or in sure-enough trouble!"
Maril said drearily;
"I don't know what you've done, except—"
Calhoun blinked at her, in the act of hauling the vacuum suit over his shoulders.
"Isn't it self-evident?" he demanded. "I've been giving astrogation lessons to these characters. I certainly didn't do it to help them dump germ-cultures on Weald! I brought them here! Don't you see the point? These are space-ships. They're in orbit around Weald. They're not manned and they're not controlled. In fact, they're nothing but sky-riding storage bins!"
He seemed to consider the explanation complete. He wriggled his arms into the sleeves and gloves of the suit. He slung the air-tanks over his shoulder and hooked them to the suit.
"I'll be back," he said. "I hope with good news. I've reason to be hopeful, though, because these Wealdians are very practical men. They have things all prepared and tidy. I suspect I'll find these ships with stores of air and fuel—maybe even food—so that if Weald should manage to make a deal for the stuff stored out here in them, they'd only have to bring out crews."
He lifted the space-helmet down from its rack and put it on. He tested it, reading the tank air-pressure, power-storage, and other data from the lighted miniature instruments visible through pinholes above his eye-level. He fastened a space-rope about himself, speaking through the helmet's opened face-plate.
"If our friends should wake up before I get back," he added, "please restrain them. I'd hate to be marooned."
He went waddling into the airlock with the coil of space-rope over one vacuum-suited arm. The inner lock door closed behind him A little later Maril heard the outer lock open. Then soundlessness.
Murgatroyd whimpered a little. Maril shivered. Calhoun had gone out of the ship to nothingness. He'd said that what he was looking for—and what he'd found—was forty-two thousand miles from Weald. One could imagine falling forty-two thousand miles, where one couldn't imagine falling a light-year. Calhoun was walking on the steel plates of a gigantic space-ship which floated among dozens of its fellows, all seeming derelicts and seemingly abandoned. He was able to walk on the nearest because of magnetic-soled shoes. He trusted his life to them and to a flimsy space-rope which trailed after him out the Med Ship's airlock.
Time passed. A clock ticked in that hurried tempo of five ticks to the second which has been the habit of clocks since time immemorial. Very small and trivial noises came from the background tape, preventing utter silence from hanging intolerably in the ship. They were traffic-sounds, recorded on a world no one knew how many light-years distant, and nobody knew when. There were sounds as of voices, too faint to suggest words, but imparting a feel of life and activity to a soundless ship.
Maril found herself listening tensely for something else. One of the four bound blueskins snored, and stirred, and slept again. Murgatroyd gazed about unhappily, and swung down to the control-room floor, and then paused for lack of any place to go or thing to do. He sat down and began half-heartedly to lick his whiskers. Maril stirred.
Murgatroyd looked at her hopefully.
"Chee?" he asked shrilly.
She shook her head. It became a habit to act as if Murgatroyd were a human being.
"N-no," she said unsteadily. "Not yet."
More time passed. An unbearably long time. Then there was the faintest of clankings. It repeated. Then, abruptly, there were noises in the airlock. They continued. They were fumbling noises.
The outer airlock door closed. The inner door opened. Dense white fog came out of it. There was motion. Calhoun followed the fog out of the lock. He carried objects which had been weightless, but were suddenly heavy in the ship's gravity-field. There were two space-suits and a curious assortment of parcels. He spread them out, flipped aside the face-plate, and said briskly;
"This stuff is cold! Turn a heater on it, will you Maril?"
He began to work his way out of his vacuum-suit.
"Item," he said. "The ships are fuelled and provisioned. A practical tribe, the Wealdians! The ships are ready to take off as soon as they're warmed up inside. A half-degree sun doesn't radiate heat enough to keep a ship warm, when the rest of the cosmos is effectively near zero Kelvin. Here, point the heaters like this."
He adjusted the radiant-heat dispensers. The fog disappeared where their beams played. But the metal space-suits glistened and steamed,—and the steam disappeared within inches. They were so completely and utterly cold that they condensed the air about them as a liquid, which reëvaporated to make fog, which warmed up and disappeared and was immediately replaced.
"Item," said Calhoun again, getting his arms out of the vacuum-suit sleeves. "The controls are pretty nearly standard. Our sleeping friends will be able to astrogate them back to Dara without trouble, provided only that nobody comes out here to bother us before they leave."
He shed the last of the space-suit, stepping out of its legs.
"And," he finished wrily, "I brought back an emergency supply of ship-provisions for everybody concerned, but find that I'm idiot enough to feel that they'll choke me if I eat them while Dara's still starving."
Maril said;
"But—there isn't any hope for Dara! No real hope!"
He gaped at her.
"What do you think we're here for?"
He set to work to restore his four recent students to consciousness. It was not a difficult task. The dosage, mixed in the coffee he had given them earlier, was a light one. Calhoun took the precaution of disarming them first, but presently four hot-eyed young men glared at him.
"I'm calling," said Calhoun, holding a blaster negligently in his hand, "I'm calling for volunteers. There's a famine on Dara. There've been unmanageable crop-surpluses on Weald. On Dara, the government grimly rations every ounce of food. On Weald, the government has been buying up surplus grain to keep the price up. To save storage costs, it's loaded the grain into out-of-date space-ships it once used to stand sentry over Dara to keep it out of space when there was another famine there. Those ships have been put out in orbit, where we're hooked on to one of them. It's loaded with half a million bushels of grain. I've brought space-suits from it, I've turned on the heaters in its interior, and I've set its overdrive unit for a hop to Dara. Now I'm calling for volunteers to take half a million bushels of grain to where it's needed. Do I get any volunteers?"
He got four. Not immediately, because they were ashamed that he'd made it impossible to carry out their original fanatic plan, and now offered something much better to make up for it. They raged. But half a million bushels of grain meant that people who must otherwise die might live.
Ultimately, truculently, first one and then another angrily agreed.
"Good!" said Calhoun. "Now, how many of you dare risk the trip alone? I've got one grain-ship warming up. There are plenty of others around us. Every one of you can take a ship and half a million bushels to Dara, if you have the nerve?"
The atmosphere changed. Suddenly they clamored for the task he offered them. They were still acutely uncomfortable. He'd bossed them and taught them until they felt capable and glamorous and proud. Then he'd pinned their ears back. But if they returned to Dara with four enemy ships and unimaginable quantities of food with which to break the famine....
There was work to be done first, of course. Only one ship was so far warming up. Three more had to be entered, in space-suits, and each had to have its interior warmed so breathable air could exist inside it, and at least part of the stored provisions had to be brought up to reasonable temperature for use on the journey. Then the overdrive unit had to be inspected and set for the length of journey that a direct overdrive hop to Dara would mean, and Calhoun had to make sure again that each of the four could identify Dara's sun under all circumstances and aim for it with the requisite high precision, both before going into overdrive and after breakout. When all that was accomplished, Calhoun might reasonably hope that they'd arrive. But it wasn't a certainty.
Still, presently his four students shook hands with him, with the fine tolerance of young men intending much greater achievements than their teacher. They wouldn't speak on communicator again, because their messages might be picked up on Weald.
Of course for this action to be successful, it had to be performed with the stealth of sneak-thieves.
What seemed a long time passed. Then one ship turned slowly upon some unseen axis. It wavered back and forth, seeking a point of aim. A second twisted in its place. A third put on the barest trace of solar-system drive to get clear of the rest. The fourth ...
One ship vanished. It had gone into overdrive, heading for Dara at many times the speed of light. Another. Two more.
That was all. The remainder of the fleet hung clumsily in emptiness. And Calhoun worriedly went over in his mind the lessons he'd given in such a pathetically small number of days. If the four ships reached Dara, their pilots would be heroes. Calhoun had presented them with that estate over their bitter objection. But they would glory in it, if they reached Dara.
Maril looked at him with very strange eyes.
"Now what?" she asked.
"We hang around," said Calhoun, "to see if anybody comes up from Weald to find out what's happened. It's always possible to pick up a sort of signal when a ship goes into overdrive. Usually it doesn't mean a thing. Nobody pays any attention. But if somebody comes out here—"
"What?"
"It'll be regrettable," said Calhoun. He was suddenly very tired. "It'll spoil any chance of our coming back and stealing some more food—like interstellar mice. If they find out what we've done they'll expect us to try it again. They might get set to fight. Or they might simply land the rest of these ships."
"If I'd realized what you were about," said Maril, "I'd have joined in the lessons. I could have piloted a ship."
"You wouldn't have wanted to," said Calhoun. He yawned. "You wouldn't want to be a heroine."
"Why?"
"Korvan," said Calhoun. He yawned again. "I've asked about him. He's been trying very desperately to deserve well of his fellow blueskins. All he's accomplished is develop a way to starve painlessly. He wouldn't feel comfortable with a girl who'd helped make starving unnecessary. He'd admire you politely, but he'd never marry you. And you know it."
She shook her head, but it was not easy to tell whether she denied the reaction of Korvan—whom Calhoun had never met—or denied that he was more important to her than anything else. The last was what Calhoun plainly implied.
"You don't seem to be trying to be a hero!" she protested.
"I'd enjoy it," admitted Calhoun, "but I have a job to do. It's got to be done. It's much more important than being admired."
"You could take another ship back," she told him. "It would be worth more to Dara than the Med Ship is! And then everybody would realize that you'd planned everything."
"Ah!" said Calhoun. "But you've no idea how much this ship matters to Dara!"
He seated himself at the controls. He slipped headphones over his ears. He listened. Very, very carefully, he monitored all the wave-lengths and wave-forms he could discover in use on Weald. There was no mention of the oddity of behavior of shiploads of surplus grain aloft. There was no mention of the ships at all. But there was plenty of mention of Dara, and blueskins, and of the vicious political fight now going on to see which political party could promise the most complete protection against blueskins.
After a full hour of it, Calhoun flipped off his receptor and swung the Med Ship to an exact, painstakingly precise aim at the sun around which Dara rolled. He said;
"Overdrive coming, Murgatroyd!"
Murgatroyd grabbed. The stars went out and the universe reeled and the Med Ship became a sort of cosmos all its own.
Calhoun yawned again.
"Now there's nothing to be done for a day or two," he said wearily, "and I'm beginning to understand why people sleep all they can, on Dara. It's one way not to feel hungry."
Maril said tensely;
"You're going back? After they took the ship from you?"
"The job's not finished," he explained. "Not even the famine's ended, and the famine's a second-order effect. If there were no such thing as a blueskin, there'd be no famine. Food could be traded for. We've got to do something to make sure there are no more famines."
She looked at him oddly.
"It would be desirable," she said with irony. "But you can't do it."
"Not today, no," he admitted. Then he said longingly, "I'm about to catch up on some sleep."
Maril rose and went into the other cabin. He settled down into the chair and fell instantly asleep.
For very many ship-hours, then, there was no action or activity or happening of any imaginable consequence in the Med Ship. Very, very far away, light-years distant and light years apart, four shiploads of grain hurtled toward the famine-stricken planet of blueskins. Each great ship had a single semi-skilled blueskin for pilot and crew. Thousands of millions of suns blazed with violence appropriate to their stellar types in a galaxy of which a very small proportion had been explored and colonized by humanity. The human race was now to be counted in quadrillions on scores of hundreds of inhabited worlds, but the tiny Med Ship seemed the least significant of all possible created things. It could travel between star-systems and even star-clusters, but it was not yet capable of crossing the continent of suns on which the human race arose. And between any two solar systems the journeying of the Med Ship consumed much time. Which would be maddening for someone with no work to do or no resources in himself, or herself.
On the second ship-day Calhoun labored painstakingly and somewhat distastefully at the little biological laboratory. Maril watched him in a sort of brooding silence. Murgatroyd slept much of the time, with his furry tail wrapped meticulously across his nose.
Toward the end of the day Calhoun finished his task. He had a matter of six or seven cubic centimeters of clear liquid as the conclusion of a long process of culturing, and examination by microscope, and again culturing plus final filtration. He looked at a clock and calculated time.
"Better wait until tomorrow," he observed, and put the bit of clear liquid in a temperature-controlled place of safe-keeping.
"What is it?" asked Maril. "What's it for?"
"It's part of a job I have on hand," said Calhoun. He considered. "How about some music?"
She looked astonished. But he set up an instrument and fed microtape into it and settled back to listen. Then there was music such as she had never heard before. Again it was a device to counteract isolation and monotonous between-planet voyages. To keep it from losing its effectiveness, Calhoun rationed himself on music, as on other things. Calhoun deliberately went for weeks between uses of his recordings, so that music was an event to be looked forward to and cherished.
When he tapered off the stirring symphonies of Kun Gee with tranquilizing, soothing melodies from the Rim School of composers, Maril regarded him with a very peculiar gaze indeed.
"I think I understand now," she said slowly, "why you don't act like other people. Toward me, for example. The way you live gives you what other people have to try to get in crazy ways,—making their work feed their vanity, and justify pride, and make them feel significant. But you can put your whole mind on your work."
He thought it over.
"Med Ship routine is designed to keep one healthy in his mind," he admitted. "It works pretty well. It satisfies all my mental appetites. But naturally there are instincts—"
She waited. He did not finish.
"What do you do about instincts that work and music and such things can't satisfy?"
Calhoun grinned wrily;
"I'm stern with them. I have to be."
He stood up and plainly expected her to go into the other cabin for the night. She did.
It was after breakfast-time of the next ship-day when he got out the sample of clear liquid he'd worked so long to produce. "We'll see how it works," he observed. "Murgatroyd's handy in case of a slip-up. It's perfectly safe so long as he's aboard and there are only the two of us."
She watched as he injected half a cc under his own skin. Then she shivered a little.
"What will it do?"
"That remains to be seen." He paused a moment. "You and I," he said with some dryness, "make a perfect test for anything. If you catch something from me, it will be infective indeed!"
She gazed at him utterly without comprehension.
He took his own temperature. He brought out the folios which were his orders, covering each of the planets he should give a standard Medical Service inspection. Weald was there. Dara wasn't. But a Med Service man has much freedom of action, even when only keeping up the routine of normal Med Service. When catching up on badly neglected operations, he necessarily has much more. Calhoun went over the folios.
Two hours later he took his temperature again. He looked pleased. He made an entry in the ship's log. Two hours later yet he found himself drinking thirstily and looked more pleased still. He made another entry in the log and matter-of-factly drew a small quantity of blood from his own vein and called to Murgatroyd. Murgatroyd submitted amiably to the very trivial operation Calhoun carried out. Calhoun put away the equipment and saw Maril staring at him with a certain look of shock.
"It doesn't hurt him," Calhoun explained. "Right after he's born there's a tiny spot on his flank that has the pain-nerves desensitized. Murgatroyd's all right. That's what he's for!"
"But he's—your friend!"
"He's my assistant. I don't ask anything of him that I can do myself. But we're both Med Service. And I do things for him that he can't do for himself. For example, I make coffee for him."
Murgatroyd heard the familiar word. He said;
"Chee!"
"Very well," agreed Calhoun. "We'll all have some."
He made coffee. Murgatroyd sipped at the cup especially made for his little paws. Once he scratched at the place on his flank which had no pain-nerves. It itched. But he was perfectly content. Murgatroyd would always be contented when he was somewhere near Calhoun.
Another hour went by. Murgatroyd climbed up into Calhoun's lap and with a determined air went to sleep there. Calhoun disturbed him long enough to get an instrument out of his pocket. He listened to Murgatroyd's heartbeat with it while Murgatroyd dozed.
"Maril," he said. "Write down something for me. The time, and ninety-six, and one-twenty over ninety-four."
She obeyed, not comprehending. Half an hour later—still not stirring to disturb Murgatroyd—he had her write down another time and sequence of figures, only slightly different from the first. Half an hour later still, a third set. But then he put Murgatroyd down, well satisfied.
He took his own temperature. He nodded.
"Murgatroyd and I have one more chore to do," he told her. "Would you go in the other cabin for a moment?"
She went disturbedly into the other cabin. Calhoun drew a sample of blood from the insensitive area on Murgatroyd's flank. Murgatroyd submitted with complete confidence in the man. In ten minutes Calhoun had diluted the sample, added an anticoagulant, shaken it up thoroughly, and filtered it to clarity with all red and white corpuscles removed. Another Med Ship man would have considered that Calhoun had had Murgatroyd prepare a splendid small sample of antibody-containing serum, in case something got out of hand. It would assuredly take care of two patients.
But a Med Ship man would also have known that it was simply one of those scrupulous precautions a Med Ship man takes when using cultures from store.
Calhoun put the sample away and called Maril back and offered no explanation. She said;
"I'll fix lunch." She hesitated. "You brought some food from the first Weald ship. Do you want it?"
He shook his head.
"I'm squeamish," he admitted. "The trouble on Dara is Med Service fault. Before my time, but still—I'll stick to rations until everybody eats."
He watched her unobtrusively as the day went on. Presently he considered that she was slightly flushed. Shortly after the evening meal of singularly unappetizing Darian rations, she drank thirstily. He did not comment. He brought out cards and showed her a complicated game of solitaire in which mental arithmetic and expert use of probability increased one's chance of winning.
By midnight, ship-time, she'd learned the game and played it absorbedly. Calhoun was able to scrutinize her without appearing to do so, and he was satisfied again. When he mentioned that the Med Ship should arrive off Dara in eight hours more, she put the cards away and went into the other cabin.
Calhoun wrote up the log. He added the notes that Maril had made for him, of Murgatroyd's pulse and blood-pressure after the injection of the same culture that produced fever and thirstiness in himself and later—without contact with him or the culture—in Maril. He put a professional comment at the end.
"The culture seems to have retained its normal characteristics during long storage in the spore state. It revived and reproduced rapidly. I injected .5 cc under my skin and in less than one hour my temperature was 30.8°C. An hour later it was 30.9°C. This was its peak. It immediately returned to normal. The only other observable symptom was slightly increased thirst. Blood-pressure and pulse remained normal. The other person in the Med Ship displayed the same symptoms, in prompt and complete repetition, without physical contact."
He went to sleep, with Murgatroyd curled up in his cubbyhole.
The Med Ship broke out of overdrive at 1300 hours, ship time. Calhoun made contact with the grid and was promptly lowered to the ground.
It was almost two hours later—1500 hours ship-time—when the people of Dara were informed by broadcast that Calhoun was publicly to be executed; immediately.
CHAPTER 7
From the viewpoint of Darians, the decision of Calhoun's guilt and the decision to execute him were reasonable enough. Maril protested fiercely, and her testimony agreed with Calhoun's in every respect, but from a blueskin viewpoint their own statements were damning.
Calhoun had taken four young astrogators to space. They were the only semi-skilled space-pilots Dara had. There were no fully qualified men. Calhoun had asked for them, and taken them out to emptiness, and there he had instructed them in modern guidance-methods for ships of space. So far there was no disagreement. He'd proposed to make them more competent pilots; more capable of driving a ship to Orede, for example, to raid the enormous cattle-herds there. And he'd had them drive the Med Ship to Weald, against which there could be no objection.
But just before arrival he had tricked all four of them by giving them drugged coffee. He'd destroyed the lethal bacterial cultures they'd been ordered to dump on Weald. Then he'd sent the four student pilots off separately—so he and Maril claimed—in huge ships crammed with grain. But those ships were not to be believed in, anyhow. Nobody on Dara could imagine stores of food bought up and stored away because it was useless; to keep up prices. Nobody believed in shiploads of grain to be had for the taking. They did know that the only four partially experienced space-pilots on Dara had been taken away and by Calhoun's own story sent out of the ship after they'd been drugged. Had they been trained, and had they been helped or even permitted to sow the seeds of plague on Weald, and had they come back prepared to pass on training to other men to handle other space-ships now feverishly being built in hidden places on Dara,—why—then Dara might have a chance of survival. But a space-battle with only partly trained pilots would be hazardous at best. With no trained pilots at all, it would be hopeless. So Calhoun, by his own story, appeared to have doomed every living being on Dara to massacre from the bombs of Weald.
It was this last angle which destroyed any chance of anybody believing in such fairy-tale objects as ships loaded down with grain. Calhoun had shattered Dara's feeble hope of resistance. Weald had some ships and could build or buy others faster than Dara could hope to construct them. Equally important, Weald had a plenitude of experienced spacemen to man some ships fully and train the crews of others. If it had become desperately busy fighting plague, then a fleet to exterminate life on Dara would be delayed. Dara might have gained time at least to build ships which could ram their enemies and destroy them that way.
But Calhoun had made it impossible. If he told the truth and Weald already had a fleet of huge ships which only needed to be emptied of grain and filled with guns and men—why—Dara was doomed. But if he did not tell the truth it was equally doomed by his actions. So Calhoun would be killed.
His execution was to take place in the open space of the landing-grid, with vision-cameras transmitting the sight over all the blueskin planet. Half-starved men, with grisly blue blotches on their skins, marched him to the center of the largest level space on the planet which was not desperately being cultivated. Their hatred showed in their expressions. Bitterness and fury surrounded Calhoun like a wall. Most of Dara would have liked to see him killed in a manner as atrocious as his crime, but no conceivable death would be satisfying.
So the affair was coldly businesslike, with not even insults offered to him. He was left to stand alone in the very center of the landing-grid floor. There were a hundred blasters which would fire upon him at the same instant. He would not only be killed; he would be destroyed. He would be vaporized by the blue-white flames poured upon him.
His death was remarkably close. Nothing remained but the order to fire, when loudspeakers from the landing-grid office froze everything. One of the grain-ships from Weald had broken out of overdrive and its pilot was triumphantly calling for landing-coördinates. The grid office relayed his call to loudspeaker circuits as the quickest way to get it on the communication system of the whole planet.
"Calling ground," boomed the triumphant voice of the first of the student pilots Calhoun had trained. "Calling ground! Pilot Franz in captured ship requests coördinates for landing! Purpose of landing, to deliver half a million bushels of grain captured from the enemy!"
At first, nobody dared believe it. But the pilot could be seen on vision. He was known. No blueskin would be left alive long enough to be used as a decoy by the men of Weald! Presently the giant ship on its second voyage to Dara—the first had been a generation ago, when it threatened death and destruction—appeared as a dark pinpoint in the sky. It came down and down, and presently it hovered over the center of the tarmac, where Calhoun composedly stood on the spot where he was to have been executed.
The landing-grid crew shifted the ship to one side, and only then did Calhoun stroll in a leisurely fashion toward the Med Ship by the grid's metal-lace wall.
The big ship touched ground, and its exit-port revolved and opened, and the student pilot stood there grinning and heaving out handsful of grain. There was a swarming, yelling, deliriously triumphant crowd, then, where only minutes before there'd been a mob waiting to rejoice when Calhoun's living body exploded into flame.
They no longer hated Calhoun, but he had to fight his way to the Med Ship, nevertheless. He was surrounded by now-ecstatically admiring citizens of Dara, only minutes since they'd thirsted for his blood.
Two hours after the first ship, a second landed. Dara went wild again. Four hours later still, the third arrived. The fourth came down on the following day.
Then Calhoun faced the executive and cabinet of Dara for the second time. His tone and manner were very dry.
"Now," he said curtly, "I would like a few more astrogators to train. I think it likely that we can raid the Wealdian grain-fleet one time more, and in so doing get the beginning of a fleet for defense. I insist, however, that it must not be used in combat! We might as well be sensible about this situation! After all, four shiploads of grain won't break the famine! They'll help a lot, but they're only the beginning of what's needed for a planetary population!"
"How much grain can we hope for?" demanded a man with a blue mark covering all his chin.
Calhoun told him.
"How long before Weald can have a fleet overhead, dropping fusion bombs?" demanded another, grimly.
Calhoun named a time. But then he said;
"I think we can keep them from dropping bombs if we can get the grain-fleet and some capable astrogators."
"What do you have in mind?"
He told them. It was not possible to tell the whole story of what he considered sensible behavior. An emotional program can be presented and accepted immediately. A plan of action which is actually intelligent, considering all elements of a situation, has to be accepted piecemeal. Even so, the military men growled.
"We've plenty of heavy elements," said one, with one eye and half his forehead colored blue. "If we'd used our brains, we'd have more bombs than Weald can hope for! We could turn that whole planet into a smoking cinder!"
"Which," said Calhoun acidly, "would give you some satisfaction but not an ounce of food! And food's more important than satisfaction. Now, I'm going to take off for Weald again. I'll want somebody to build an emergency device for my ship, and I'll want the four pilots I've trained and twenty more candidates. And I'd like to have some decent rations! When the last trip brought back two million bushels of grain, you can spare adequate food for twenty men for a few days!"
It took some time to get the special device constructed, but the Med Ship lifted in two days more. The device for which it had waited was simply a preventive of the disaster overtaking the ship from the mine on Orede. It was essentially a tank of liquid oxygen, packed in the space from which stores had been taken away. When the ship's air-supply was pumped past it, first moisture and then CO2 froze out. Then the air flowed over the liquefied oxygen at a rate to replace the CO2 with more useful breathing material. Then the moisture was restored to the air as it warmed again. For so long as the oxygen lasted, fresh air for any number of men could be kept purified and breathable. The Med Ship's normal equipment could take care of no more than ten. But with this it could journey to Weald with almost any complement on board.
Maril stayed on Dara when the Med Ship left. Murgatroyd protested shrilly when he discovered her about to be closed out by the closing lock-door.
"Chee!" he said indignantly. "Chee! Chee!"
"No," said Calhoun, "we'll be crowded enough anyhow. We'll see her later."
He nodded to one of the first four student pilots, and he crisply made contact with the landing-grid office. He very efficiently supervised as the grid took the ship up. The other three of the four first-trained men explained every move to sub-classes assigned to each. Calhoun moved about, listening and making certain that the instruction was up to standard.
He felt queer, acting as the supervisor of an educational institution in space. He did not like it. There were twenty-four men beside himself crowded into the Med Ship's small interior. They got in each other's way. They trampled on each other. There was always somebody eating, and always somebody sleeping, and there was no need whatever for the background tape to keep the ship from being intolerably quiet. But the air-system worked well enough, except once when the reheater unit quit and the air inside the ship went down below freezing before the trouble could be found and corrected.
The journey to Weald, this time, took seven days because of the training program in effect. Calhoun bit his nails over the delay. But it was necessary for each of the students to make his own line-ups on Weald's sun, and compute distances, and for each of them to practise maneuverings that would presently be called for. Calhoun hoped desperately that preparations for active warfare—or massacre—did not move fast on Weald. He believed, however, that in the absence of direct news from Dara, Wealdian officials would take the normal course of politicos. They had proclaimed the deathship from Orede an attack from Dara. Therefore they would specialize on defensive measures before plumping for offense. They'd get patrol-ships out to spot invasion ships long before they worked on a fleet to destroy the blueskins. It would meet the public demand for defense.
Calhoun was right. The Med Ship made its final approach to Weald under Calhoun's own control. He'd made brightness-measurements on his previous journey and he used them again. They would not be strictly accurate, because a sunspot could knock all meaning out of any reading beyond two decimal places. But the first breakout was just far enough from the Wealdian system for Calhoun to be able to pick out its planets with electron telescope at maximum magnification. He could aim for Weald itself,—allowing, of course, for the lag in the apparent motion of its image because of the limited speed of light. He tried the briefest of overdrive hops, and came out within the solar system and well inside any watching patrol.
That was pure fortune. It continued. He'd broken through the screen of guard-ships in undetectable overdrive. He was within half an hour's solar-system drive of the grain-fleet. There was no alarm, at first. Of course radars spotted the Med Ship as an object, but nobody paid attention. It was not headed for Weald. It was probably assumed to be a guard-boat itself. Such mistakes do happen. It reached the grain-fleet.
Again from the storage-space from which supplies had been removed, Calhoun produced vacuum suits. The four first students went out, each escorting a less-accustomed neophyte and all fastened firmly together with space-ropes. They warmed the interiors of four ships and went on to others. Presently there were eight ships making ready for an interstellar journey, each with a scared but resolute new pilot familiarizing himself with its controls. There were sixteen ships. Twenty. Twenty-three.
A guard-ship came humming out from Weald. It would be armed, of course. It came droning, droning up the forty-odd thousand miles from the planet. Calhoun swore. He could not call his students and tell them what was happening. The guard-ship would overhear. He could not trust untried young men to act rationally if they were unwarned and the guard-ship arrived and matter-of-factly attempted to board one of them.
Then he was inspired. He called Murgatroyd, placed him before the communicator, and set it at voice-only transmission. This was familiar enough, to Murgatroyd. He'd often seen Calhoun use a communicator.
"Chee!" shrilled Murgatroyd. "Chee-chee!"
A startled voice came out of the speaker.
"What's that?"
"Chee," said Murgatroyd zestfully.
The communicator was talking to him. Murgatroyd adored three things in order. One was Calhoun. The second was coffee. The third was pretending to converse like a human being. The speaker said explosively;
"You there, identify yourself!"
"Chee-chee-chee-chee!" observed Murgatroyd. He wriggled with pleasure and added, reasonably enough, "Chee!"
The communicator bawled;
"Calling ground! Calling ground! Listen to this! Something that ain't human's talking at me on a communicator! Listen in an' tell me what to do!"
Murgatroyd interposed with another shrill;
"Chee!"
Then Calhoun pulled the Med Ship slowly away from the clump of still-lifeless grain-ships. It was highly improbable that the guard-boat would carry an electron telescope. Most likely it would have only an echo-radar, and so could determine only that an object of some sort moved of its own accord in space. Calhoun let the Med Ship accelerate. That would be final evidence. The grain-ships were between Weald and its sun. Even electron telescopes on the ground—and electron-telescopes were ultimately optical telescopes with electronic amplification—even electron telescopes on the ground could not get a good image of the ship through sunlit atmosphere.
"Chee?" asked Murgatroyd solicitously. "Chee-chee-chee?"
"Is it blueskins?" shakily demanded the voice from the guard-boat. "Ground! Ground! Is it blueskins?"
A heavy, authoritative voice came in with much greater volume.
"That's no human voice," it said harshly. "Approach its ship and send back an image. Don't fire first unless it heads for ground."
The guard-ship swerved and headed for the Med Ship. It was still a very long way off.
"Chee-chee," said Murgatroyd encouragingly.
Calhoun changed the Med Ship's course. The guard-ship changed course too. Calhoun let it draw nearer,—but only a little. He led it away from the fleet of grain-ships.
He swung his electron telescope on them. He saw a space-suited figure outside one,—safely roped, however. It was easy to guess that someone had meant to return to the Med Ship for orders or to make a report, and found the Med Ship gone. He'd go back inside and turn on a communicator.
"Chee!" said Murgatroyd.
The heavy voice boomed;
"You there! This is a human-occupied world! If you come in peace, cut your drive and let our guard-ship approach!"
Murgatroyd replied in an interested but doubtful tone. The booming voice bellowed. Another voice of higher authority took over. Murgatroyd was entranced that so many people wanted to talk to him. He made what for him was practically an oration. The last voice spoke persuasively and suavely.
"Chee-chee-chee-chee," said Murgatroyd.
One of the grain-ships flickered and ceased to be. It had gone into overdrive. Another. And another. Suddenly they began to flick out of sight by twos and threes.
"Chee," said Murgatroyd with a note of finality.
The last grain-ship vanished.
"Calling guard-ship," said Calhoun drily. "This is Med ship Aesclipus Twenty. I called here a couple of weeks ago. You've been talking to my tormal, Murgatroyd."
A pause. A blank pause. Then profanity of deep and savage intemperance.
"I've been on Dara," said Calhoun.
Dead silence fell.
"There's a famine there," said Calhoun deliberately. "So the grain-ships you've had in orbit have been taken away by men from Dara—blueskins if you like—to feed themselves and their families. They've been dying of hunger and they don't like it."
There was a single burst of the unprintable. Then the formerly suave voice said waspishly;
"Well? The Med Service will hear of your interference!"
"Yes," said Calhoun. "I'll report it myself. I have a message for you. Dara is ready to pay for every ounce of grain and for the ships it was stored in. They'll pay in heavy metals,—iridium, uranium,—that sort of thing."
The suave voice fairly curdled.
"As if we'd allow anything that was ever on Dara to touch ground here!"
"Ah! But there can be sterilization. To begin with metals, uranium melts at 1150° centigrade, and tungsten at 3370° and iridium at 2350°. You could load such things and melt them down in space and then tow them home. And you can actually sterilize a lot of other useful materials!"
The suave voice said infuriatedly;
"I'll report this! You'll suffer for this!"
Calhoun said pleasantly;
"I'm sure that what I say is being recorded, so that I'll add that it's perfectly practical for Wealdians to land on Dara, take whatever property they think wise,—to pay for damage done by blueskins, of course—and get back to Wealdian ships with absolutely no danger of carrying contagion. If you'll make sure the recording's clear."
He described, clearly and specifically, exactly how a man could be outfitted to walk into any area of any conceivable contagion, do whatever seemed necessary in the way of looting—but Calhoun did not use the word—and then return to his fellows with no risk whatever of bringing back infection. He gave exact details. Then he said;
"My radar says you've four ships converging on me to blast me out of space. I sign off."
The Med Ship disappeared from normal space, and entered that improbably stressed area of extension which it formed about itself and in which physical constants were wildly strange. For one thing, the speed of light in overdrive-stressed space had not been measured yet. It was too high. For another, a ship could travel very many times 186000 miles per second in overdrive.
The Med Ship did just that. There was nobody but Calhoun and Murgatroyd on board. There was companionable silence,—there were only the small threshold-of-perception sounds which one did not often notice, but which it would have been intolerable to have stop.
Calhoun luxuriated in regained privacy. For seven days he'd had twenty-four other human beings crowded into the two cabins of the ship, with never so much as one yard of space between himself and someone else. One need not be snobbish to wish to be alone sometimes!
Murgatroyd licked his whiskers thoughtfully.
"I hope," said Calhoun, "that things work out right. But they may remember on Dara that I'm responsible for some ten million bushels of grain reaching them. Maybe—just possibly—they'll listen to me and act sensibly. After all, there's only one way to break a famine. Not with ten million bushels for a whole planet! And certainly not with bombs!"
Driving direct, without pausing for practisings, the Med Ship could arrive at Dara in little more than five days. Calhoun looked forward to relaxation. As a beginning he made ready to give himself an adequate meal for the first time since first landing on Dara. Then, presently, he sat down wrily to a double meal of Darian famine-rations, which were far from appetizing. But there wasn't anything else on board.
He had some pleasure later, though, envisioning what went elsewhere. On Weald, obviously, there would be purest panic. The vanishing of the grain fleet wouldn't be charged against twenty-four men. A Darian fleet would be suspected, and with the suspicion terror, and with terror a governmental crisis. Then there'd be a frantic seizure of any craft that could take to space, and the agitated improvisation of a space-fleet.
But besides that, biological-warfare technicians would examine Calhoun's instructions for equipment by which armed men could be landed on a plague-stricken planet and then safely taken off again. Military and governmental officials would come to the eminently sane conclusion that while Calhoun could not well take active measures against blueskins, as a sane and proper citizen of the galaxy he would be on the side of law and order and propriety and justice,—in short, of Weald. So they ordered sample anti-contagion suits made according to Calhoun's directions, and they had them tested. They worked admirably.
On Dara, while Calhoun journeyed back to it, grain was distributed lavishly, and everybody on the planet had their cereal ration almost doubled. It was still not a comfortable ration, but the relief was great. There was considerable gratitude felt for Calhoun, which as usual included a lively anticipation of further favors to come. Maril was interviewed repeatedly, as the person best able to discuss him, and she did his reputation no harm. That was not all that happened on Dara ...
There was something else. Very curious thing, too. There was a curious spread of mild symptoms which nobody could exactly call a disease. It lasted only a few hours. A person felt slightly feverish, and ran a temperature which peaked at 30.9° centigrade, and drank more water than usual. Then his temperature went back to normal and he forgot all about it. There have always been such trivial epidemics. They are rarely recorded, because few people think to go to a doctor. That was the case here.
Calhoun looked ahead a little, too. Presently the fleet of grain-ships would arrive and unload and lift again for Orede, and this time they would make an infinity of slaughter among wild cattle-herds, and bring back incredible quantities of fresh-slaughtered frozen beef. Almost everybody would get to taste meat again, which would be most gratifying.
Then, the industries of Dara would labor at government-required tasks. An astonishing amount of fissionable material would be fashioned into bombs—a concession by Calhoun—and plastic factories make an astonishing number of plastic sag-suits. And large shipments of heavy metals in ingots would be made to the planet's capital city and there would be some guns and minor items....
Perhaps somebody could have found out any of these items in advance, but it was unlikely that anybody did. Nobody but Calhoun, however, would ever have put them together and hoped very urgently that that was the way things would work out. He could see a promising total result. In fact, in the Med ship hurtling through space, on the fourth day of his journey he thought of an improvement that could be made in the sum of all those happenings when they were put together.
He landed on Dara. Maril came to the Med Ship. Murgatroyd greeted her with enthusiasm.
"Something unusual has happened," said Maril, very much subdued. "I told you that—sometimes blueskin markings fade out on children, and then neither they nor their children ever have blueskin markings again."
"Yes," said Calhoun. "I remember."
"And you were reminded of a group of viruses on Tralee. You said they only took hold of people in terribly bad physical condition, but then they could be passed on from mother to child. Until—sometimes—they died out."
Calhoun blinked.
"Yes...."
"Korvan," said Maril very carefully, "Has worked out an idea that that's what happens to the blueskin markings on—us Darians. He thinks that people almost dead of the plague could get the—virus, and if they recovered from the plague pass the virus on and—be blueskins."
"Interesting," said Calhoun, noncommittally.
"And when we went to Weald," said Maril very carefully indeed, "you were working with some culture-material. You wrote quite a lot about it in the ship's log. You gave yourself an injection. Remember? And Murgatroyd? You wrote down your temperature, and Murgatroyd's?" She moistened her lips. "You said that if infection passed between us, something would be very infectious indeed?"
"What are you driving at?"
Maril continued slowly. "Th—thousands of people are having their pigment-spots fade away. Not only children but grownups. And—Korvan has found out that it always seems to happen after a day when they felt feverish and very thirsty—and then felt all right again. You tried out something that made you feverish and thirsty. I had it too, in the ship. Korvan thinks there's been an epidemic of something that—is obliterating the blue spots on everybody that catches it. There are always trivial epidemics that nobody notices. Korvan's found evidence of one that's making 'blueskin' no longer a word with any meaning."
"Remarkable!" said Calhoun.
"Did you—do it?" asked Maril. "Did you start a harmless epidemic that—wipes out the virus that makes blueskins?"
Calhoun said in feigned astonishment;
"How can you think such a thing, Maril?"
"Because I was there," said Maril. She said somehow desperately; "I know you did it! But the question is—are you going to tell? When people find they're not blueskins any longer—when there's no such thing as a blueskin any longer—will you tell them why?"
"Naturally not," said Calhoun. "Why?" Then he guessed. "Has Korvan—."
"He thinks," said Maril, "that he thought it up all by himself. He's found the proof. He's—very proud. I'd have to tell him the truth if you were going to tell. And he'd be ashamed and—angry."
Calhoun considered, staring at her.
"How it happened doesn't matter," he said at last. "The idea of anybody doing it deliberately would be disturbing, too. It shouldn't get about. So it seems much the best thing for Korvan to discover what's happened to the blueskin pigment, and how it happened, but not why."
She read his face carefully.
"You aren't doing it as a favor to me," she decided. "You'd rather it was that way."
She looked at him for a long time, until he squirmed. Then she nodded and went away.
An hour later the Wealdian space-fleet was reported, massed in space and driving for Dara.
CHAPTER 8
There were small scout-ships which came on ahead of the main fleet. They'd originally been guard-boats, intended for solar-system duty only and quite incapable of overdrive. They'd come from Weald in the cargo-holds of the liners now transformed into fighting ships. The scouts swept low, transmitting fine-screen images back to the fleet, of all that they might see before they were shot down. They found the landing-grid. It contained nothing larger than Calhoun's Med Ship, Aesclipus Twenty.
They searched here and there. They flitted to and fro, scanning wide bands of the surface of Dara. The planet's cities and highways and industrial centers were wholly open to inspection from the sky. It looked as if the scouts hunted most busily for the fleet of former grain-ships which Calhoun had said blueskins had seized and rushed away. If the scouts looked for them, they did not find them.
Dara offered no opposition to the scout-ships. Nothing rose to space to oppose or to resist their search. They went darting over every portion of the hungry planet, land and seas alike, and there was no sign of military preparedness against their coming. The huge ships of the main fleet waited while they reported monotonously that they saw no sign of the stolen fleet. But the stolen fleet was the only means by which the planet could be defended. There could be no point in a pitched battle in emptiness. But a fleet with a planet to back it might be dangerous.
Hours passed. The Wealdian main fleet waited. There was no offensive movement by the fleet. There was no defensive action from the ground, With fusion-bombs certain to be involved in any actual conflict, there was something like an embarrassed pause. The Wealdian ships were ready to bomb. They were less anxious to be vaporized by possible suicide-dashes of defending ships who might blow themselves up near contact with their enemies.
But a fleet cannot travel some light-years through space to make a mere threat. And the Wealdian fleet was furnished with the material for total devastation. It could drop bombs from hundreds, or thousands, or even tens of thousands of miles away. It could cover the world of Dara with mushroom clouds springing up and spreading to make a continuous pall of atomic-fusion products. And they could settle down and kill every living thing not destroyed by the explosions themselves. Even the creatures of the deepest oceans would die of deadly, purposely-contrived fallout particles.
The Wealdian fleet contemplated its own destructiveness. It found no capacity for defense on Dara. It moved forward.
But then a message went out from the capital city of Dara. It said that a ship in overdrive had carried word to a Darian fleet in space. The Darian fleet now hurtled toward Weald. It was a fleet of thirty-seven giant ships. They carried such-and-such bombs in such-and-such quantities. Unless its orders were countermanded, it would deliver those bombs on Weald—set to explode. If Weald bombed Dara, the orders could not be withdrawn. So Weald could bomb Dara. It could destroy all life on the pariah planet. But Weald would die with it.
The fleet ceased its advance. The situation was a stalemate with pure desperation on one side and pure frustration on the other. This was no way to end the war. Neither planet could trust the other, even for minutes. If they did not destroy each other simultaneously, as now was possible, each would expect the other to launch an unwarned attack at some other moment. Ultimately one or the other must perish, and the survivor would be the one most skilled in treachery.
But then the pariah planet made a new proposal. It would send a messenger-ship to stop its own fleet's bombardment if Weald would accept payment for the grain-ships and their cargoes. It would pay in ingots of iridium and uranium and tungsten—and gold if Weald wished it—for all damages Weald might claim. It would even pay indemnity for the miners of Orede, who had died by accident but perhaps in some sense through its fault. It would pay.... But if it were bombed, Weald must spout atomic fire and the fleet of Weald would have no home planet to return to.
This proposal seemed both craven and foolish. It would allow the fleet of Weald to loot and then betray Dara. But it was Calhoun's idea. It seemed plausible to the admirals of Weald. They felt only contempt for blueskins. Contemptuously, they accepted the semi-surrender.
The broadcast waves of Dara told of agreement, and wild and fierce resentment filled the pariah planet's people. There was almost—almost!—revolution to insist upon resistance, however hopeless and however fatal. But not all of Dara realized that a vital change had come about in the state of things on Dara. The enemy fleet had not a hint of it. And therefore—
In menacing array, the invading fleet spread itself about the skies of Dara, well beyond the atmosphere. Harsh voices talked with increasing arrogance to the landing-grid staff. A monster ship of Weald came heavily down, riding the landing-grid's force-fields. It touched gently. Its occupants were apprehensive, but hungry for the loot they had been assured was theirs. The ship's outer hull would be sterilized before it returned to Weald, of course. And there was adequate protection for the landing-party.
Men came out of the ship's ports. They wore the double, transparent sag-suits Calhoun had suggested, which had been painstakingly tested, and which were perfect protection against contagion. They could loot with impunity, and all contamination would remain outside the suits. What loot they gathered, obviously, could be decontaminated before it was returned to Weald. It was a most satisfactory discovery, to realize that blueskins could be not only scorned but robbed. There was only one bit of relevant information the space-fleet of Weald did not have.
That information was that the people of Dara weren't blueskins any longer. There'd been a trivial epidemic.
The sag-suited men of Weald went zestfully about their business. They took over the landing-grid's operation, driving the Darian operators away. For the first time in history the operators of a landing-grid wore makeup to look like they did have blue pigment in their skins. The Wealdian landing-party tested the grid's operation. They brought down another giant ship. Then another. And another.
Parties in the shiny sag-suits spread through the city. There were the huge stock-piles of precious metals, brought in readiness to be surrendered and carried away. Some men set to work to load these into the holds—to be sterilized later. Some went forthrightly after personal loot.
They came upon very few Darians. Those they saw kept sullenly away from them. They entered shops and took what they fancied. They zestfully removed the treasure of banks.
Triumphal and scornful reports went up to the hovering great ships. The blueskins, said the reports were spiritless and cowardly. They permitted themselves to be robbed. They kept out of the way. It had been observed that the population was streaming out of the city, fleeing because they feared the ships' landing-parties. The blueskins had abjectly produced all they'd promised of precious metals, but there was more to be taken.
More ships came down, and more. Some of the first, heavily loaded, were lifted to emptiness again and the process of decontamination of their hulls began. There was jealousy among the ships in space for those upon the ground. The first-landed ships had had their choice of loot. There were squabblings about priorities, now that the navy of Weald plainly had a license to steal. There was confusion among the members of the landing-parties. Discipline disappeared. Men in plastic sag-suits roved about as individuals, seeking what they might loot.
There were armed and alerted landing-parties around the grid itself, of course, but the capital city of Dara lay open. Men coming back with loot found their ships already lifted off to make room for others. They were pushed into reëmbarking-parties of other ships. There were more and more men to be found on ships where they did not belong, and more and more not to be found where they did. By the time half the fleet had been aground, there was no longer any pretense of holding a ship down until all its crew returned. There were too many other ships' companies clamoring for their turn to loot. The rosters of many ships, indeed, bore no particular relationship to the men actually on board.
There were less than fifteen ships whose to-be-fumigated holds were still empty, when the watchful government of Dara broadcast a new message to the invaders. It requested that the looting stop. No matter what payment Weald claimed, it had taken payment five times over. Now was time to stop.
It was amusing. The space-admiral of Weald ordered his ships alerted for action. The message-ship, ordering the Darian fleet away from Weald, had been sent off long since. No other ship could get away now! The Darians could take their choice; accept the consequences of surrender, or the fleet would rise to throw down bombs.
Calhoun was asking politely to be taken to the Wealdian admiral when the trouble began. It wasn't on the ground, at all. Everything was under splendid control where a landing-force occupied the grid and all the ground immediately about it. The space admiral had headquarters in the landing-grid office. Reports came in, orders were issued, admirably crisp salutes were exchanged among sag-suited men.... Everything was in perfect shape there.
But there was panic among the ships in space. Communicators gave off horrified, panic-stricken yells. There were screamings. Intelligible communications ceased. Ships plunged crazily this way and that. Some vanished in overdrive. At least one plunged at full power into a Darian ocean.
The space-admiral found himself in command of fifteen ships only, out of all his former force. The rest of the fleet went through a period of hysterical madness. In some ships it lasted for minutes only. In others it went on for half an hour or more. Then they hung overhead, but did not reply to calls.
Calhoun arrived at the space-port with Murgatroyd riding on his shoulder. A bewildered officer in a sag-suit halted him.
"I've come," said Calhoun, "to speak to the admiral. My name is Calhoun and I'm Med Service, and I think I met the Admiral at a banquet a few weeks ago. He'll remember me."
"You'll have to wait," protested the officer. "There's some trouble—"