She whipped him when he covered up the big sheets of sticky yellow fly paper she put in his room, and whipped him when he poured out the shallow dishes of fly poison she kept on the landing. But she seemed too badly shaken to strike him, on the sultry afternoon when she found him liberating the flies in the screen wire trap outside the kitchen.
“You sinful little infidel!”
Her nerves were all on edge. She had to sit down on the doorstep, resting her weak heart and gasping with her asthma. But her fat pink fingers seemed strong enough when she caught him by the ear.
She called the hired man to bring a torch dipped in gasoline, and held him so that he had to watch while she burned the flies that were left in the trap. He stood shivering with his own pain, quiet and pale and ill.
“Now come along!” She led him up the stairs, by his twisted ear. “I’ll teach you whether flies have souls.” Her voice was like a saw when it strikes a nail. “I’m going to lock you up tonight without your supper, but I’ll be up in the morning.”
She shoved him into the stifling attic room. It was bare and narrow as the monastery cells, with only his hard little cot and his precious teakwood chest. His tears blurred the painted carving on the chest - it was the blue snake of the deva Parshva, who had reached nirvana a very long time before.
She held him, by the twisted ear.
“Believe me, Thomas, this hurts me terribly.” She snuffled and cleared her throat. “But I want you to pray tonight. Beg God to clean up your dirty little soul.”
She gave his ear another twist.
“When I come back in the morning I want you to get down on your bended knees with me and confess to Him that all this rot about flies with souls is only a wicked lie.”
“But it’s the truth!” He caught his breath, and tried not to whimper. “Please, Aunt Agatha, let me read you part of the sacred book—”
“Sacred?” She shook him by the ear. “You filthy little blasphemer! I’m going down now to pray for you. But when I come back in the morning, I’m going to open up your box and take away that heathen writing. I declare, it’s what gives you all those wicked notions. I’m going to burn it in the kitchen stove.”
“But - Aunt Agatha!” He shivered with a sharper pain. “Without the secret book I can’t guide anybody toward nirvana. I can’t help my father and mother, struggling under their load of karma. I won’t even know little Mira Bai, if I should ever find her.”
“I’ll teach you what you need to know.” She let go his tingling ear, and boxed it sharply. “We’ll burn that book in the morning. And you’ll forget every word it says, or stay in this room till you starve.”
* * * *
She locked the door on him and waddled down the stairs again, weeping for his soul and wheezing with her asthma. She had a good nip of whisky for her heart, and filled herself a nice plate of cold roast chicken and potato salad before she went up to her own room to pray.
For a long time Tommy sat alone on the edge of the hard lumpy cot, with his throbbing head in his hands. Crying was no use; old Chandra Sha had taught him that. He longed for his father and mother, those tanned happy wanderers he could barely remember. But the wheel had turned for them.
Nothing was left, except the sacred parchment. When the ringing in his punished ear had stopped, he bent to unlock the teakwood chest. He unrolled the brittle yellow scroll. His pale lips moved silently, following the faded black-and-scarlet characters.
The book, he felt, was more precious than all Kansas. He had to save it, to help his reborn parents, and to find Mira Bai, and even to aid his aunt. Her poor soul was laden, surely, with a perilous burden of karma, but perhaps the science of the book could find her a more fortunate rebirth.
Trembling and afraid, he began to do what the holy men had taught him.
* * * *
It was the hired girl, next morning, who came up to unlock his room. She was looking for his Aunt Agatha.
“I can’t understand it.” Her twangy Kansas voice was half hysterical. “I didn’t hear a thing, all night long. The outside doors are locked up tight, and none of her things are missing. But I’ve looked high and low, and your sweet old auntie isn’t anywhere.”
The little boy looked thin and pale and drawn. His dark eyes were rimmed with grime, hollowed for want of sleep. He was rolling up the long strip of brittle yellow parchment. Very carefully, he replaced it in the painted case.
“I think you wouldn’t know her now.” His shy little voice was rusty and regretful. “Because the wheel of her life has turned again. She has entered another cycle, you see.”
“I don’t know what you mean.” The startled girl stared at him. “But I’m afraid something awful has happened to your poor old auntie. I’m going to phone the sheriff.”
Tommy was downstairs in the gloomy front room when the sheriff came, standing in a chair drawn up against the mantel.
“Now don’t you worry, little man,” the sheriff boomed. “I’m come to find old Miz Grimm. Just tell me when you seen her last.”
“Here she is, right now,” Tommy whispered faintly. “But if you haven’t been instructed in the science of transmigration, I don’t think you’ll know her.”
He was leaning over one of the big yellow sheets of adhesive fly paper that Aunt Agatha liked to leave spread at night to catch flies while she slept. He was trying to help a big blue fly, that was hopelessly tangled and droning in its last feeble fury.
“Pore little young-un!” the sheriff clucked sympathetically. “His aunt told me he was full of funny heathen notions!”
He didn’t even glance at the dying fly. But Tommy hadn’t found it hard to recognize. Its right eye was furious, bluish green, and the left was a tiny bead of wet brown glass.
<
* * * *
med service
murray leinster
The probability of unfavorable consequences cannot be zero in any action of common life, but the probability increases by a very high power as a series of actions is lengthened. The effect of moral considerations, in conduct, may be stated to be a mathematically verifiable reduction in the number of unfavorable possible chance happenings. Of course, whether this process is termed the intelligent use of probability, or ethics, or piety, makes no difference in the fact. It is the method by which unfavorable chance happenings are made least probable. Arbitrary actions such as we call criminal cannot ever be justified by mathematics. For example ...
Probability and Human Conduct, FITZGERALD
Calhoun lay in his bunk and read Fitzgerald on “Probability and Human Conduct” as the little Med Ship floated in overdrive. In overdrive travel there is nothing to do but pass the time away. Murgatroyd, the tormal, slept curled up in a ball in one corner of the small ship’s cabin. His tail was meticulously curled about his nose. The ship’s lights burned steadily. There were those small random noises which have to be provided to keep a man sane in the dead stillness of a ship traveling at thirty times the speed of light. Calhoun turned a page and yawned.
Something stirred somewhere. There was a click, and a taped voice said:
“When the tone sounds, breakout will be five seconds off.”
A metronomic ticking, grave and deliberate, resounded in the stillness. Calhoun heaved himself up from the bunk and marked his place in the book. He moved to and seated himself in the control chair and fastened the safety belt. He said:
“Murgatroyd! Hark, hark the lark in Heaven’s something-or-other doth sing. Wake up and comb your whiskers. We’re getting there.”
Murgatroyd opened one eye and saw Calhoun in the pilot’s chair. He uncurled himself and padded to a place where there was something to grab hold of. He regarded Calhoun with bright eyes.
“BONG!” said the tape. It counted down. “Five - four - three - two - one - “
It stopped. The ship popped out of overdrive. The sensation was unmistakable. Calhoun’s stomach seemed to turn over twice, and he had a sickish feeling of spiraling
dizzily in what was somehow a cone. He swallowed. Murgatroyd made gulping noises. Outside, everything changed.
The sun Maris blazed silently in emptiness off to port. The Cetis star-cluster was astern, and the light by which it could be seen had traveled for many years to reach here, though Calhoun had left Med Headquarters only three weeks before. The third planet of Maris swung splendidly in its orbit. Calhoun checked, and nodded in satisfaction. He spoke over his shoulder to Murgatroyd.
“We’re here, all right.”
“Chee!” shrilled Murgatroyd.
He uncoiled his tail from about a cabinet-handle and hopped up to look at the vision screen. What he saw, of course, meant nothing to him. But all tormals imitate the actions of human beings, as parrots imitate their speech. He blinked wisely at the screen and turned his eyes to Calhoun.
“It’s Maris III,” Calhoun told him, “and pretty close. It’s a colony of Dettra Two. One city was reported started two Earth-years ago. It should just about be colonized now.”
“Chee-chee!” shrilled Murgatroyd.
“So get out of the way,” commanded Calhoun. “We’ll make our approach and I’ll tell ‘em we’re here.”
He made a standard approach on interplanetary drive. Naturally, it was a long process. But after some hours he flipped over the call-switch and made the usual identification and landing request.
“Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty to ground,” he said into the transmitter. “Requesting co-ordinates for landing. Our mass is fifty tons. Repeat, five-oh tons. Purpose of landing, planetary health inspection.”
He relaxed. This job ought to be purest routine. There was a landing grid in the spaceport city on Maris III. From its control room instructions should be sent, indicating a position some five planetary diameters or farther out from the surface of that world. Calhoun’s little ship should repair to that spot. The giant landing grid should then reach out its specialized force-field and lock onto the ship, and then bring it gently but irresistibly down to ground. Then Calhoun, representing Med Service, should confer gravely with planetary authorities about public health conditions on Maris III.
It was not to be expected that anything important would turn up. Calhoun would deliver full details of recent advances in the progress of medicine. These might already have reached Maris III in the ordinary course of commerce, but he would make sure. He might - but it was unlikely - learn of some novelty worked out here. In any case, within three days he should return to the small Med Ship, the landing grid should heave it firmly heavenward to not less than five planetary diameters distance, and there release it. And Calhoun and Murgatroyd and the Med Ship should flick into overdrive and speed back toward Headquarters, from whence they had come.
Right now, Calhoun waited for an answer to his landing call. But he regarded the vast disk of the nearby planet.
“By the map,” he observed to Murgatroyd, “the city ought to be on the shore of that bay somewhere near the terminus. Close to the sunset line.”
His call was answered. A voice said incredulously on the space-phone speaker:
“What? What’s that? What’s that you say?”
“Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty,” Calhoun repeated patiently. “Requesting co-ordinates for landing. Our mass is fifty tons. Repeat, five-oh tons. Purpose of landing, planetary health inspection.”
The voice said more incredulously still:
“A Med Ship? Holy—” By the change of sound, the man down on the planet had turned away from the microphone. “Hey! Listen to this—”
There was abrupt silence. Calhoun raised his eyebrows. He drummed on the control desk before him.
There was a long pause. A very long pause. Then a new voice came on the space phone, up from the ground:
“You up aloft there! Identify yourself!”
Calhoun said very politely:
“This is Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty. I would like to come to ground. Purpose of landing, health inspection.”
“Wait,” said the voice from the planet. It sounded strained.
A murmuring sounded, transmitted from fifty thousand miles away. Then there was a click. The transmitter down below had cut off. Calhoun raised his eyebrows again. This was not according to routine. Not at all! The Med Service was badly overworked and understaffed. The resources of interplanetary services were always apt to be stretched to their utmost, because there could be no galactic government as such. Some thousands of occupied planets, the closest of them light-years apart - or weeks of traveling - couldn’t hold elections or have political parties for the simple reason that travel even in overdrive was too slow. They could only have service organizations whose authority depended on the consent of the people served, and whose support had to be gathered when and as it was possible.
But the Med Service was admittedly important. The local Sector Headquarters was in the Cetis cluster. It was a sort of interstellar clinic, with additions. It gathered and disseminated the results of experience in health and medicine among some thousands of colony-worlds, and from time to time it made contact with other Headquarters carrying on the same work elsewhere. It admittedly took fifty years for a new technique in gene-selection to cross the so-far-occupied part of the galaxy, but it was a three-year voyage in overdrive to cover the same distance direct. And the Med Service was worth while. There was no problem of human ecological adjustment it had so far been unable to solve, and there were some dozens of planets whose human colonies owed their existence to it. There was nowhere - nowhere at all - that a Med Ship was not welcomed on its errand from Headquarters.
“Aground there!” said Calhoun sharply. “What’s the matter? Are you landing me or not?”
There was no answer. Then, suddenly, every sound-producing device in the ship abruptly emitted a hoarse and monstrous noise. The lights flashed up and circuit-breakers cut them off. The nearby-object horn squawked. The hull-temperature warning squealed. The ship’s internal gravity-field tugged horribly for an instant and went off. Every device within the ship designed to notify emergency clanged or shrieked or roared or screamed. There was a momentary bedlam.
It lasted for part of a second only. Then everything stopped. There was no weight within the ship, and there were no lights, and there was dead silence, and Murgatroyd made whimpering sounds in the darkness.
Calhoun thought absurdly to himself, “According to the book, this is an unfavorable chance consequence of something or other.” But it was more than an unfavorable chance occurrence. It was an intentional and drastic and possibly a deadly one.
“Somebody’s acting up,” said Calhoun measuredly, in the blackness. “What’s the matter with them?”
He flipped the screen switch to bring back vision of what was outside. The vision screens of a ship are very carefully fused against overload burnouts, because there is nothing in all the cosmos quite as helpless and foredoomed as a ship which is blind in the emptiness of space. But the screens did not light again. They couldn’t. The cutouts hadn’t worked in time.
Calhoun’s scalp crawled. But as his eyes adjusted, he saw the palely fluorescent handles of switches and doors. They hadn’t been made fluorescent in expectation of an emergency like this, of course, but they would help a great deal. He knew what had happened. It couldn’t be but one thing - a landing-grid field clamped on the fifty-ton Med Ship with the power needed to grasp and land a twenty-thousand-ton liner. At that strength it would paralyze every instrument and blow every cut-off. It could not be accident. The reception of the news of his identity, the repeated request that he identify himself, and then the demand that he wait—This murderous performance was deliberate.
“Maybe,” said Calhoun in the inky-black cabin, “as a Med Ship our arrival is an unfavorable chance consequence of something - or the unfavorableness is - and somebody means to keep us from happening. It looks like it.”
Murgatroyd whimpered.
“And I think,” added Calhoun coldly, “that somebody may need a swift kick in the negative feedback!”
He released himself from the safety-belt and dived across the cabin in which there was now no weight at all. In the blackness he opened a cabinet door. What he did inside was customarily done by a man wearing thick insulating gloves, in the landing grid back at Headquarters. He threw certain switches which would allow the discharge of the power-storage cells which worked the Med Ship’s overdrive. Monstrous quantities of energy were required to put even a fifty-ton ship into overdrive, and monstrous amounts were returned when it came out. The power amounted to ounces of pure, raw energy, and as a safety-precaution such amounts were normally put into the Duhanne cells only just before a Med Ship’s launching, and drained out again on its return. But now, Calhoun threw switches which made a rather incredible amount of power available for dumping into the landing-grid field about him - if necessary.
Kornbluth, Mary (Ed) Page 14