The ship lurched - violently. It was being moved by the grid field without any gentleness at all. Calhoun’s hands barely grasped the back of his pilot’s chair before the jerk came, and it almost tore them free. He just missed being flung against the back wall of the cabin by the applied acceleration. But he was a long way out from the planet. He was at the end of a lever fifty thousand miles long. For that lever to be used to shake him too brutally would require special adjustments. But somebody was making them. The jerk reversed directions. He was flung savagely against the chair to which he’d been clinging. He struggled. Another yank, in another direction. Another one still. It flung him violently into the chair.
Behind him, Murgatroyd squealed angrily as he went hurtling across the cabin. He grabbed for holding-places with all four paws and his tail.
Another shake. Calhoun had barely clipped the safety belt fast before a furious jolt nearly flung him out of it again to crash against the cabin ceiling. Yet another vicious surge of acceleration. He scrabbled for the controls. The yanks and plungings of the ship increased intolerably. He was nauseated. Once he was thrust so furiously into the control chair that he was on the verge of blacking out, and then the direction of thrust was changed to the exact opposite so that the blood rushing to his head seemed about to explode it. His arms flailed out of control. He became dazed. But when his hands were flung against the control board, despite their bruising he tried to cling to the control knobs, and each time he threw them over. Practically all his circuits were blown, but there was one—
His numbing fingers threw it. There was a roar, so fierce that it seemed an explosion. He’d reached the switch which made effective the discharge-circuit of his Duhanne cells. He’d thrown it. It was designed to let the little ship’s overdrive power-reserve flow into storage at Headquarters on return from duty. Now, though, it poured into the landing field outside. It amounted to hundreds of millions of kilowatt hours, delivered in the fraction of a second. There was the smell of ozone. The sound was like a thunder clap.
But abruptly there was a strange and incredible peace. The lights came on waveringly as his shaking fingers restored the circuit breakers. Murgatroyd shrilled indignantly, clinging desperately to an instrument rack. But the vision screens did not light again. Calhoun swore. Swiftly, he threw more circuit-restorers. The nearest-object indicator told of the presence of Maris III at forty-odd thousand miles. The hull-temperature indicator was up some fifty-six degrees. The internal-gravity field came on, faintly, and then built up to normal. But the screens would not light. They were permanently dead. Calhoun raged for seconds. Then he got hold of himself.
“Chee-chee-chee!” chattered Murgatroyd desperately. “Chee-chee!”
“Shut up!” growled Calhoun. “Some bright lad aground thought up a new way to commit murder. Damned near got away with it, too! He figured he’d shake us to death like a dog does a rat, only he was using a landing-grid field to do it with! Right now, I hope I fried him!”
But it was not likely. Such quantities of power as are used to handle twenty-thousand-ton space liners are not controlled direct, but by relays. The power Calhoun had flung into the grid field should have blown out the grid’s transformers with a spectacular display of fireworks, but it was hardly probable it had gotten back to the individual at the controls.
“But I suspect,” observed Calhoun vengefully, “that he’ll consider this business an unfavorable occurrence! Somebody’ll twist his tail, too, either for trying what he did or for not getting away with it! Only, as a matter of pure precaution—”
His expression changed suddenly. He’d been trying not to think of the consequences of having no sight of the cosmos outside the ship. Now he remembered the electron telescope. It had not been in circuit, so it could not have been burned out like his vision screens. He switched it on. A star field appeared over his head.
“Chee-chee!” cried Murgatroyd hysterically.
Calhoun glanced at him. The jerking of the ship had shifted the instruments in the rack to which Murgatroyd clung. Clipped into place though they were, they’d caught Murgatroyd’s tail and pinched it tightly.
“You’ll have to wait,” snapped Calhoun. “Right now I’ve got to make us look like a successful accident. Otherwise whoever tried to spread us all over the cabin walls will try something else!”
The Med Ship flung through space in whatever direction and at whatever velocity it had possessed when the grid field blew. Calhoun shifted the electron-telescope field and simultaneously threw on the emergency-rocket controls. There was a growling of the pencil-thin, high-velocity blasts. There was a surging of the ship.
“No straight-line stuff,” Calhoun reminded himself.
He swung the ship into a dizzy spiral, as if innumerable things had been torn or battered loose in the ship and its rockets had come on of themselves. Painstakingly, he jettisoned in one explosive burst all the stored waste of his journey which could not be disposed of while in overdrive. To any space-scanning instrument on the ground, it would look like something detonating violently inside the ship.
“Now—”
The planet Maris III swung across the electron-telescope’s field. It looked hideously near - but that was the telescope’s magnification. Yet Calhoun sweated. He looked at the nearest-object dial for reassurance. The planet was nearer by a thousand miles.
“Hah!” said Calhoun.
He changed the ship’s spiral course. He changed it again. He abruptly reversed the direction of its turn. Adequate training in space-combat might have helped plot an evasion-course, but it might have been recognizable. Nobody could anticipate his maneuvers now, though. He adjusted the telescope next time the planet swept across its field, and flipped on the photorecorder. Then he pulled out of the spiral, whirled the ship until the city was covered by the telescope, and ran the recorder as long as he dared keep a straight course. Then he swooped toward the planet in a crazy, twisting fall with erratic intermissions, and made a final lunatic dash almost parallel to the planet’s surface.
At five hundred miles, he unshielded the ports which of necessity had to be kept covered in clear space. There was a sky which was vividly bright with stars. There was a vast blackness off to starboard which was the night side of the planet.
He went down. At four hundred miles the outside pressure indicator wavered away from its pin. He used it like a Pitot-tube recording, doing sums in his head to figure the static pressure that should exist at this height, to compare with the dynamic pressure produced by his velocity through the near hard vacuum. The pressure should have been substantially zero. He swung the ship end-for-end and killed velocity to bring the pressure-indication down. The ship descended. Two hundred miles. He saw the thin bright line of sunshine at the limb of the planet. Down to one hundred. He cut the rockets and let the ship fall silently, swinging it nose up.
At ten miles he listened for man-made radiation. There was nothing in the electromagnetic spectrum but the crackling of static in an electric storm which might be a thousand miles away. At five miles height the nearest-object indicator, near the bottom of its scale, wavered in a fashion to prove that he was still moving laterally across mountainous country. He swung the ship and killed that velocity, too.
At two miles he used the rockets for deceleration. The pencil-thin flame reached down for an incredible distance. By naked-eye observation out a port he tilted the fiercely-roaring, swiftly, falling ship until hillsides and forests underneath him ceased to move. By that time he was very low indeed.
He reached ground on a mountainside which was lighted by the blue-white flame of the rocket-blast. He chose an area in which the tree tops were almost flat, indicating something like a plateau underneath. Murgatroyd was practically frantic by this time because of his capture and the pinching of his tail, but Calhoun could not spare time to release him. He let the ship down gently, gently, trying to descend in an absolutely vertical line.
If he didn’t do it perfectly, he came very close. T
he ship settled into what was practically a burned-away tunnel among monstrous trees. The high-velocity slender flame did not splash when it reached ground. It penetrated. It burned a hole for itself through humus and clay and bedrock. When the ship touched and settled, there was boiling molten stone some sixty feet underground, but there was a small scratching sound as it came to rest. A flame-amputated tree-limb rubbed tentatively against the hull.
Calhoun turned off the rockets. The ship swayed slightly and there were crunching noises. Then it was still on its landing fins.
“Now,” said Calhoun, “I can take care of you, Murgatroyd.”
He flicked on the switches of the exterior microphones - much more sensitive than human ears. The radiation-detectors were still in action. They reported only the cracklings of the distant storm.
But the microphones brought in the moaning of wind over nearby mountaintops, and the almost deafening susurrus of rustling leaves. Underneath these noises there was a bedlam of other natural sounds. There were chirpings and hootings and squeaks, and the gruntings made by native animal life. These sounds had a singularly peaceful quality. When Calhoun toned them down to be no more than background-noises, they suggested the sort of concert of night-creatures which to men has always seemed an indication of purest tranquility.
Presently Calhoun looked at the pictures the photorecorder had taken while the telescope’s field swept over the city. It was the colony-city reported to have been begun two years before, to receive colonists from Dettra Two. It was the city of the landing grid which had tried to destroy the Med Ship as a dog kills a rat - by shaking it to fragments, some fifty thousand miles in space. It was the city which had made Calhoun land with his vision-plates blinded, that had made him pretend his ship was internally a wreck: which had drained his power-reserves of some hundreds of millions of kilowatt hours of energy. It was the city which had made his return to Med Headquarters impossible.
He inspected the telescopic pictures. They were very clear. They showed the city with astonishing detail. There was a lacy pattern of highways, with their medallions of multiple-dwelling units. There were the lavish park areas between the buildings of this planetary capital. There was the landing grid itself - a half-mile-high structure of steel girders, a full mile in diameter.
But there were no vehicles on the highways. There were no specks on the crossing bridges to indicate people on foot. There were no copters on the building roofs, nor were there objects in mid-air to tell of air traffic.
The city was either deserted or it had never been occupied. But it was absolutely intact. The structures were perfect. There was no indication of past panic or disaster, and even the highways had not been overgrown by vegetation. But it was empty - or else it was dead.
But somebody in it had tried very ferociously and with singular effectiveness to try to destroy the Med Ship.
Because it was a Med Ship.
Calhoun raised his eyebrows and looked at Murgatroyd.
“Why is all this?” he asked. “Have you any ideas?”
“Chee!” shrilled Murgatroyd.
* * * *
II
The purpose of a contemplated human action is always the attainment of a desired subjective experience. But a subjective experience is desired both in terms of intensity, and in terms of duration. For an individual the temptingness of different degrees of intensity-of-experience is readily computed. However, the temptingness of different durations is equally necessary for the computation of the probability of a given individual performing a given action. This modification of desirability by expectable duration depends on the individual’s time-sense: its acuity and its accuracy. Measurements of time-sense—
Probability and Human Conduct, FITZGERALD
Two days later Calhoun found a cultivated field and a dead man, but before that he found only bewilderment. Before leaving the Med Ship, he very carefully monitored all over again the entire radiation spectrum for man-made signals. There were no communications in the air of Maris III - which on the face of it was proof that the planet was uninhabited. But the ship’s external microphones picked up a rocket roar in mid-morning of the day after Calhoun’s landing. By the time the sound reached the ground, of course, the rocket itself was far below the horizon, but Calhoun saw the faint white trail of its passage against the blue of the sky. The fact that he saw it, in daytime, was proof that it was within the atmosphere. Which, in turn, said that the rocket was taking photographs from high altitude for signs of the crater the Med Ship should have made in an uncontrolled landing.
The fact of search proved that the planet was inhabited, and the silence of the radio spectrum said that it wasn’t. The absence of traffic in the city said that it was dead or empty, but there were people there because they’d answered Calhoun’s hail, and tried to kill him when he identified himself. But nobody would want to destroy a Med Ship except to prevent a health inspection, and nobody would want to prevent an inspection unless there was a situation aground that the Med Service ought to know about. But there should not possibly be such a situation.
There was no logical explanation for such a series of contradictions. Civilized men acted this way or that. There could only be civilized men here. They acted neither this way nor that. Therefore - the confusion began all over again.
Calhoun dictated an account of events to date into the emergency responder in the ship. If a search-call came from space, the responder would broadcast this data and Calhoun’s intended action. He carefully shut off all other operating circuits so the ship couldn’t be found by their radiation. He equipped himself for travel, and he and Murgatroyd left the ship. Obviously, he headed toward the city where whatever was wrong was centered.
Travel on foot was unaccustomed, but not difficult. The vegetation was semi-familiar. Maris III was an Earth-type planet and circled a Sol-type sun, and given similar conditions of gravity, air, sunlight, and temperature-range, similar organisms should develop. There would be room, for example, for low-growing ground-cover plants and there would also be advantages to height. There would be some equivalent of grasses, and there would be the equivalent of trees, with intermediate forms having in-between habits of growth. Similar reasoning would apply to animal life. There would be parallel ecological niches for animals to fill, and animals would adapt to fill them.
Maris III was not, then, an “unearthly” environment. It was much more like an unfamiliar part of a known planet than a new world altogether. But there were some oddities. An herbivorous creature without legs which squirmed like a snake. It lived in holes. A pigeon-sized creature whose wings were modified, gossamer-thin scales with iridescent colorings. There were creatures which seemed to live in lunatic association, and Calhoun was irritably curious to know if they were really symbiotes or only unrecognizable forms of the same organism, like the terrestrial male and female firefly-glowworm.
But he was heading for the city. He couldn’t spare time to biologize. On his first day’s journey he looked for food to save the rations he carried. Murgatroyd was handy, here. The little tormal had his place in human society. He was friendly, and he was passionately imitative of human beings, and he had a definite psychology of his own. But he was useful, too. When Calhoun strode through the forests which had such curiously un-leaflike foliage, Murgatroyd strode grandly with him, imitating his walk. From time to time he dropped to all four paws to investigate something. He invariably caught up with Calhoun within seconds.
Once Calhoun saw him interestedly bite a tiny bit out of a most unpromising looking shrub-stalk. He savored its flavour, and then swallowed it. Calhoun took note of the plant and cut off a section. He bound it to the skin of his arm up near the elbow. Hours later there was no allergic reaction, so he tasted it. It was almost familiar. It had the flavor of a bracken-shoot, mingled with a fruity taste. It would be a green bulk-food like spinach or asparagus, filling but without much substance.
Later Murgatroyd carefully examined a luscious-seeming fruit which gr
ew low enough for him to pluck. He sniffed it closely and drew back. Calhoun noted that plant, too. Murgatroyd’s tribe was bred at Headquarters for some highly valuable qualities. One was a very sensitive stomach - but it was only one. Murgatroyd’s metabolism was very close to man’s. If he ate something and it didn’t disagree with him, it was very likely safe for a man to eat it, too. If he rejected something, it probably wasn’t. But his real value was much more important than the tasting of questionable foods.
When Calhoun camped the first night, he made a fire of a plant shaped like a cactus-barrel and permeated with oil. By heaping dirt around it, he confined its burning to a round space very much like the direct-heat element of an electronic stove. It was an odd illustration of the fact that human progress does not involve anything really new in kind, but only increased convenience and availability of highly primitive comforts. By the light of that circular bonfire, Calhoun actually read a little. But the light was inadequate. Presently he yawned. One did not get very far in the Med Service without knowing probability in human conduct. It enabled one to check on the accuracy of statements made, whether by patients or officials, to a Med Ship man. Today, though, he’d traveled a long way on foot. He glanced at Murgatroyd, who was gravely pretending to read from a singularly straight-edged leaf.
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