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MED SHIP MAN
By MURRAY LEINSTER
Illustrated by ENSH
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine October 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
His work was healing the sick--but this planet was already dead!
I
Calhoun regarded the communicator with something like exasperation ashis taped voice repeated a standard approach-call for the twentiethtime. But no answer came, which had become irritating a long time ago.This was a new Med Service sector for Calhoun. He'd been assigned toanother man's tour of duty because the other man had been taken downwith romance. He'd gotten married, which ruled him out for Med Shipduty. So now Calhoun listened to his own voice endlessly repeating acall that should have been answered immediately.
Murgatroyd the _tormal_ watched with beady, interested eyes. The planetMaya lay off to port of the Med Ship _Esclipus Twenty_. Its almostcircular disk showed full size on a vision screen beside the ship'scontrol board. The image was absolutely clear and vividly colored.There was an ice cap in view. There were continents. There were seas.The cloud system of a considerable cyclonic disturbance could be notedoff at one side, and the continents looked reasonably as they should,and the seas were of that muddy, indescribable tint which indicatesdeep water.
Calhoun's own voice, taped an hour earlier, sounded in a speaker as itwent again to the communicator and then to the extremely visible worlda hundred thousand miles away.
”_Calling ground_,” said Calhoun's recorded voice. ”_Med Ship_ EsclipusTwenty _calling ground to report arrival and ask coordinates forlanding. Our mass is fifty standard tons. Repeat, five-oh tons. Purposeof landing, planetary health inspection._”
* * * * *
The recorded voice stopped. There was silence except for the tapedrandom noises which kept the inside of the ship from feeling like theinside of a tomb.
Murgatroyd said: ”_Chee?_”
Calhoun said ironically, ”Undoubtedly, Murgatroyd. Undoubtedly!Whoever's on duty at the spaceport stepped out for a moment, or droppeddead, or did something equally inconvenient. We have to wait until hegets back or somebody else takes over.”
Murgatroyd said ”_Chee!_” again and began to lick his whiskers. Heknew that when Calhoun called on the communicator, another human voiceshould reply. Then there should be conversation, and shortly theforce-fields of a landing-grid should take hold of the Med Ship anddraw it planet-ward. In time it ought to touch ground in a spaceportwith a gigantic, silvery landing-grid rising skyward all about it.Then there should be people greeting Calhoun cordially and welcomingMurgatroyd with smiles and petting.
”_Calling ground_,” said the recorded voice yet again. ”_Med Ship_Esclipus Twenty--”
It went on through the formal notice of arrival. Murgatroyd waitedin pleasurable anticipation. When the Med Ship arrived at a port ofcall humans gave him sweets and cakes, and they thought it charmingthat he drank coffee just like a human, only with more gusto. Aground,Murgatroyd moved zestfully in society while Calhoun worked. Calhoun'swork was conferences with planetary health officials, politelyreceiving such information as they thought important, and tactfullytelling them about the most recent developments in medical science asknown to the Interstellar Medical Service.
”Somebody,” said Calhoun darkly, ”is going to catch the devil for this!”
The communicator loudspeaker spoke abruptly.
”Calling Med Ship,” said a voice. ”Calling Med Ship _Esclipus Twenty_!Liner _Candida_ calling. Have you had an answer from ground?”
Calhoun blinked. Then he said curtly:
”Not yet. I've been calling all of half an hour, and never a word outof them!”
”We've been in orbit twelve hours,” said the voice from emptiness.”Calling all the while. No answer. We don't like it.”
Calhoun flipped a switch that threw a vision screen into circuitwith the ship's electron telescope. A starfield appeared and shiftedwildly. Then a bright dot centered itself. He raised the magnification.The bright dot swelled and became a chubby commercial ship, withthe false ports that passengers like to believe they looked throughwhen in space. Two relatively large cargo ports on each side showedthat it carried heavy freight in addition to passengers. It was oneof those workhorse intra-cluster ships that distributed the freightand passengers the long-haul liners dumped off only at establishedtransshipping ports.
Murgatroyd padded across the Med Ship's cabin and examined the imagewith a fine air of wisdom. It did not mean anything to him, but_tormals_ imitate human actions as parrots and parrakeets imitate humanspeech. He said, ”_Chee!_” as if making an observation of profoundsignificance, then went back to the cushion and again curled up.
”We don't see anything wrong aground,” the liner's voice complained,”but they don't answer calls! We don't get any scatter-signals either.We went down to two diameters and couldn't pick up a thing. And we havea passenger to land. He insists on it!”
* * * * *
By ordinary, communications between different places on a planet'ssurface use frequencies the ion-layers of the atmosphere either reflector refract down past the horizon. But there is usually some smallleakage to space, and line-of-sight frequencies are generally abundant.It is one of the annoyances of a ship coming in to port that space nearmost planets is usually full of local signals.
”I'll check,” said Calhoun curtly. ”Stand by.”
The _Candida_ would have arrived off Maya as the Med Ship had done, andcalled down as Calhoun had been doing. It was very probably a ship onschedule and the grid operator at the spaceport should have expectedit. Space commerce was important to any planet, comparing more or lesswith the export-import business of an industrial nation in ancienttimes on Earth. Planets had elaborate traffic-aid systems for thecargo-carriers which moved between solar systems as they'd once movedbetween continents on Earth. Such traffic aids were very carefullymaintained. Certainly for a spaceport landing-grid not to respond tocalls for twelve hours running seemed ominous.
”We've been wondering,” said the _Candida_ querulously, ”if there couldbe something radically wrong below. Sickness, for example.”
The word ”sickness” was a substitute for a more alarming word. But aplague had nearly wiped out the population of Dorset, once upon a time,and the first ships to arrive after it had broken out most incautiouslywent down to ground, and so carried the plague to their next two portsof call. Nowadays quarantine regulations were enforced very strictlyindeed.
”I'll try to find out what's the matter,” said Calhoun.
”We've got a passenger,” repeated the _Candida_ aggrievedly, ”whoinsists that we land him by space-boat if we don't make a ship landing.He says he has important business aground.”
Calhoun did not answer. The rights of passengers were extravagantlyprotected, these days. To fail to deliver a passenger to hisdestination entitled him to punitive damages which no spaceline couldafford. So the Med Ship would seem heaven-sent to the _Candida's_skipper. Calhoun could relieve him of responsibility.
The telescope screen winked and showed the surface of the planet ahundred thousand miles away. Calhoun glared at the image on the portscreen and guided the telescope to the spaceport city--Maya City. Hesaw highways and blocks of buildings. He saw the spaceport and itslanding-grid. He could see no motion, of course.
He raised the magnification. He raised it again. Still no motion. Heupped the magnification until the lattice-pattern of the telescope'samplifying crystal began to show. But at the ship's distance from theplanet, a ground-car
would represent only the fortieth of a second ofarc. There was atmosphere, too, with thermals; anything the size of aground-car simply couldn't be seen.
But the city showed quite clearly. Nothing massive had happened to it.No large-scale physical disaster had occurred. It simply did not answercalls from space.
* * * * *
Calhoun flipped off the screen.
”I think,” he said irritably into the communicator microphone, ”Isuspect I'll have to make an emergency landing. It could be somethingas trivial as a power failure--” but he knew that was wildlyimprobable--”or it could be--anything. I'll land on rockets and tellyou what I find.”
The voice from the _Candida_ said hopefully:
”Can you authorize us to refuse to land our passenger for his ownprotection? He's raising the devil! He insists that his businessdemands that he be landed.”
A word from Calhoun as a Med Service man would protect the spacelinerfrom a claim for damages. But Calhoun didn't like the look of things.He realized, distastefully, that he might find practically anythingdown below. He might find that he had to quarantine the planet andhimself with it. In such a case he'd need the _Candida_ to carry wordof the quarantine to other planets and thus to Med Service sectorheadquarters.
”We've lost a lot of time,” insisted the _Candida_. ”Can you authorizeus--”
”Not yet,” said Calhoun. ”I'll tell you when I land.”
”But--”
”I'm signing off for the moment,” said Calhoun. ”Stand by.”
He headed the little ship downward, and as it gathered velocity he wentover the briefing sheets covering this particular world. He'd nevertouched ground here before. His occupation, of course, was seeing tothe dissemination of medical science as it developed under the MedService. The Service itself was neither political nor administrative.But it was important. Every human-occupied world was supposed to havea Med Ship visit at least once in four years to verify the state ofpublic health.
Med Ship men like Calhoun offered advice on public-health problems.When something out of the ordinary turned up, the Med Service had astaff of researchers who hadn't been wholly baffled yet. There weregreat ships which could carry the ultimate in laboratory equipment andspecialized personnel to any place where they were needed. Not lessthan a dozen inhabited worlds in this sector alone owed the survivalof their populations to the Med Service, and the number of those whichcouldn't have been colonized without Med Service help was legion.
Calhoun reread the briefing. Maya was one of four planets in thisgeneral area whose life systems seemed to have had a common origin,suggesting that the Arrhenius theory of space-traveling spores was truein some limited sense. A genus of ground-cover plants with motile stemsand leaves and cannibalistic tendencies was considered strong evidenceof common origin.
The planet had been colonized for two centuries now, and producedorganic compounds of great value from indigenous plants, most ofwhich were used in textile manufacture. There were no local endemicinfections to which men were susceptible. A number of human-use cropswere grown. Cereals, grasses and grains, however, could not be grownbecause of the native ground-cover motile-stem plants. All wheat andcereal food had to be imported, which fact severely limited Maya'spopulation. There were about two million people on the planet, settledon a peninsula in the Yucatan Sea and a small area of mainland.Public-health surveys had shown a great many things about a greatmany subjects ... but there was no mention of anything to account forthe failure of the spaceport to respond to arrival calls from space.Naturally!
The Med Ship drove on down, and the planet revolved beneath it.
As Maya's sunlit hemisphere enlarged, Calhoun kept the telescope'sfield wide. He saw cities, and vast areas of cleared land where nativeplants were grown as raw materials for the organics' manufacturies. Hesaw very little true chlorophyll green, though. Mayan foliage tended toa dark olive color.
* * * * *
At fifty miles he was sure that the city streets were empty evenof ground-car traffic. There was no spaceship aground in thelanding-grid. There were no ground-cars in motion on the splendid,multiple-lane highways.
At thirty miles altitude there were still no signals in the atmosphere,though when he tried amplitude-modulation reception he picked upstatic. But there was no normally modulated signal on the air at anyfrequency. At twenty miles--no. At fifteen miles, broadcast power wasavailable, which proved that the landing-grid was working as usual,tapping the upper atmosphere for electric charges to furnish power forall the planet's needs.
From ten miles down to ground-touch, Calhoun was busy.
It is not too difficult to land a ship on rockets, with reasonablylevel ground to land on. But landing at a specific spot is somethingelse. Calhoun juggled the ship to descend inside the grid itself. Hisrockets burned out pencil-thin holes through the clay and stone beneaththe tarmac. He cut them off.
Silence. Stillness. The Med Ship's outside microphones picked up smallnoises of wind blowing over the city. There was no other sound at all.
--No. There was a singularly deliberate clicking sound, not loud andnot fast. Perhaps a click--a double click--every two seconds. That wasall.
Calhoun went into the airlock, with Murgatroyd frisking a little inthe expectation of great social success among the people of this world.When Calhoun cracked the outer airlock door he smelled something. Itwas a faintly sour, astringent odor that had the quality of decay init. But it was no kind of decay he recognized. Again stillness andsilence. No traffic-noise; not even the almost inaudible murmur thatevery city has in all its ways at all hours. The buildings looked asbuildings should look at daybreak, except that the doors and windowswere open. It was somehow shocking.
A ruined city is dramatic. An abandoned city is pathetic. This wasneither. It was something new. It felt as if everybody had walked away,out of sight, within the past few minutes.
Calhoun headed for the spaceport building with Murgatroyd amblingpuzzledly at his side. Murgatroyd was disturbed. There should be peoplehere! They should welcome Calhoun and admire him--Murgatroyd--and heshould be a social lion with all the sweets he could eat and all thecoffee he could put into his expandable belly. But nothing happened!Nothing at all.
”_Chee?_” he asked anxiously.
”They've gone away,” growled Calhoun. ”They probably left inground-cars. There's not one in sight.”
There wasn't. Calhoun could look out through the grid foundationsand see long, sunlit and absolutely empty streets. He arrived at thespaceport building. There was--there had been--a green area about thebase of the structure. There was not a living plant left. Leaves werewilted and limp. The remains had become almost a jelly of collapsedstems and blossoms of dark olive-green. The plants were dead; but notlong enough to have dried up. They might have wilted two or three daysbefore.
Calhoun went in the building. The spaceport log lay open on a desk. Itrecorded the arrival of freight to be shipped away--undoubtedly--on the_Candida_ now uneasily in orbit somewhere aloft. There was no sign ofdisorder. It was exactly as if the people here had walked out to lookat something interesting, and hadn't come back.
Calhoun trudged out of the spaceport and to the streets and buildingsof the city proper. It was incredible! Doors were opened or unlocked.Merchandise in the shops lay on display, exactly as it had been spreadout to interest customers. There was no sign of confusion anywhere.Even in a restaurant there were dishes and flatware on the tables. Thefood in the plates was stale, as if three days old, but it hadn't yetbegun to spoil. The appearance of everything was as if people at theirmeals had simply, at some signal, gotten up and walked out without anypanic or disturbance.
Calhoun made a wry face. He'd remembered something. Among the talesthat had been carried from Earth to the other worlds of the galaxythere was a completely unimportant mystery story which people stillsometimes tried to write an ending to. It was the story of an ancientsailing ship called the _Marie Celeste_, which was found dr
iftingaimlessly in the middle of the ocean. There was food on the cabintable, and the galley stove was still warm. There was no sign of anytrouble, or terror, or disturbance which might cause the ship to beabandoned. But there was not a living soul on board. Nobody had everbeen able to contrive a believable explanation.
”Only,” said Calhoun to Murgatroyd, ”this is on a larger scale. Thepeople of this city walked out about three days ago, and didn't comeback. Maybe all the people on the planet did the same, since there'snot a communicator in operation anywhere. To make the understatementof the century, Murgatroyd, I don't like this. I don't like it a bit!”