“Murgatroyd,” said Calhoun, “it is likely that you will interpret any strange sound as a possible undesirable subjective experience. Which is to say, as dangerous. So if you hear anything sizable coming close during the night, I hope you’ll squeal. Thank you.”
Murgatroyd said “Chee,” and Calhoun rolled over and went to sleep.
It was mid-morning of the next day when he came upon a cultivated field. It had been cleared and planted, of course, in preparation for the colonists who’d been expected to occupy the city. Familiar Earth-plants grew in it, ten feet high and more. And Calhoun examined it carefully, in the hope of finding how long since it had received attention. In his examination, he found the dead man.
As a corpse, the man was brand-new and Calhoun very carefully put himself into a strictly medical frame of mind before he bent over for a technical estimate of what had happened, and when. The dead man seemed to have died of hunger. He was terribly emaciated, and he didn’t belong in a cultivated field far from the city. By his garments he was a city-dweller and a prosperous one. He wore the jewels which nowadays indicated a man’s profession and status in it much more than the value of his possessions. There was money in his pockets, and writing materials, a wallet with pictures and identification, and the normal oddments a man would carry. He’d been a civil servant. And he shouldn’t have died of starvation.
He especially shouldn’t have gone hungry here! The sweet-maize plants were tall and green. Their ears were ripe. He hadn’t gone hungry! There were the inedible remains of at least two dozen sweet-maize ears. They had been eaten some time - some days - ago, and one of them had been left unfinished. If the dead man had eaten them but was unable to digest them, his belly should have been swollen with undigested food. It wasn’t. He’d eaten and digested and still had died, at least largely of inanition.
Calhoun scowled.
“How about this corn, Murgatroyd?” he demanded.
He reached up and broke off a half-yard-long ear. He stripped away the protecting, stringy leaves. The soft grains underneath looked appetizing. They smelled like good fresh food. Calhoun offered the ear to Murgatroyd.
The little tormal took it in his paws and on the instant was eating it with gusto.
“If you keep it down, he didn’t die of eating it,” said Calhoun, frowning, “and if he ate it - which he did - he didn’t die of starvation. Which he did.”
He waited. Murgatroyd consumed every grain upon the oversized cob. His furry belly distended a little. Calhoun offered him a second ear. He set to work on that, too, with self-evident enjoyment.
“In all history,” said Calhoun, “nobody’s ever been able to poison one of you tormals because your digestive system has a qualitative-analysis unit in it that yells bloody murder if anything’s likely to disagree with you. As a probability of tormal reaction, you’d have been nauseated before now if that stuff wasn’t good to eat.”
But Murgatroyd ate until he was distinctly pot-bellied. He left a few grains on the second ear with obvious regret. He put it down carefully on the ground. He shifted his left-hand whiskers with his paw and elaborately licked them clean. He did the same to the whiskers on the right-hand side of his mouth. He said comfortably:
“Chee!”
“Then that’s that,” Calhoun told him. “This man didn’t die of starvation. I’m getting queasy!”
He had his lab kit in his shoulder pack, of course. It was an absurdly small outfit, with almost microscopic instruments. But in Med Ship field work the techniques of microanalysis were standard. Distastefully, Calhoun took the tiny tissue-sample from which he could gather necessary information. Standing, he ran through the analytic process that seemed called for. When he finished, he buried the dead man as well as he could and started off in the direction of the city again. He scowled as he walked.
He journeyed for nearly half an hour before he spoke. Murgatroyd accompanied him on all fours, now, because of his heavy meal. After a mile and a half, Calhoun stopped and said grimly:
“Let’s check you over, Murgatroyd.”
He verified the tormal’s pulse and respiration and temperature. He put a tiny breath-sample through the part of the lab kit which read off a basic metabolism rate. The small animal was quite accustomed to the process. He submitted blandly. The result of the checkover was that Murgatroyd the tormal was perfectly normal.
“But,” said Calhoun angrily, “that man died of starvation! There was practically no fat in that tissue-sample at all! He arrived where we found him while he was strong enough to eat, and he stayed where there was good food, and he ate it, and he digested it, and he died of starvation! Why?”
Murgatroyd wriggled unhappily, because Calhoun’s tone was accusing. He said, “Chee!” in a subdued tone of voice. He looked pleadingly up at Calhoun.
“I’m not angry with you,” Calhoun told him, “but dammit—”
He packed the lab kit back into his pack, which contained food for the two of them for about a week.
“Come along!” he said bitterly. He started off. Ten minutes later he stopped. “What I said was impossible. But it happened, so it mustn’t have been what I said. I must have stated it wrongly. He could eat, because he did. He did eat, because of the cobs left. He did digest it. So why did he die of starvation? Did he stop eating?”
“Chee!” said Murgatroyd, with conviction.
Calhoun grunted and marched on once more. The man had not died of a disease - not directly. The tissue analysis gave a picture of death which denied that it came of any organ ceasing to function. Was it the failure of the organism - the man - to take the action required for living? Had he stopped eating?
Calhoun’s mind skirted the notion warily. It was not plausible. The man had been able to feed himself and had done so. Anything which came upon him and made him unable to feed himself—
“He was a city man,” growled Calhoun. “And this is a long way from the city. What was he doing away out here, anyhow?”
He hesitated and tramped on again. A city man found starved in a remote place might have become lost, somehow. But if this man was lost, he was assuredly not without food.
“If there was a ground-car,” Calhoun considered, “it wouldn’t mean anything. If he dared go back to the city he might have used it, but he wouldn’t have been where I found him if he hadn’t wanted or needed to leave the city. Hm-m-m— He walked out into the middle of the field. He was hungry - why didn’t he have food? - and he ate. He stayed there for days, judging by the amount of food he ate and digested. Why did he do that? Then he stopped eating and died. Again why?”
He crossed over the top of a rounded hillock some three miles from the shallow grave he’d made. He began to accept the idea that the dead man had stopped eating, for some reason, as the only possible explanation. But that didn’t make it plausible. He saw another ridge of higher hills ahead.
In another hour he came to the crest of that farther range. It was the worn-out remnant of a very ancient mountain-range, now eroded to a mere fifteen hundred or two thousand feet. He stopped at the very top. Here was a time and place to look and take note of what he saw. The ground stretched away in gently rolling fashion for very many miles, and there was the blue blink of sea at the horizon. A little to the left he saw shining white. He grunted.
That was the city of Maris III, which had been built to receive colonists from Dettra and relieve the population-pressure there. It had been planned as the nucleus of a splendid, spacious, civilized world-nation to be added to the number of human-occupied worlds. From its beginning it should hold a population in the hundreds of thousands. It was surrounded by cultivated fields, and the air above it should be a-shimmer with flying things belonging to its inhabitants.
Calhoun stared at it through his binoculars. They could not make an image, even so near, to compare to that the electron telescope had made from space, but he could see much. The city was perfect. It was intact. It was new. But there was no sign of occupancy anywhere in it. It
did not look dead, so much as frozen. There were no fliers above it. There was no motion on the highways. He saw one straight road which ran directly away along his line of sight. Had there been vehicles on it, he would have seen at least shifting patches of color as clots of traffic moved together. There were none.
He pressed his lips together. He began to inspect the nearer terrain. He saw foreshortened areas where square miles of ground had been cleared and planted to Earth vegetation. The ground would have been bulldozed clean, and then great sterilizers would have lumbered back and forth, killing every native seed and root and even the native soil-bacteria. Then there would have been spraying with cultures of the nitrogen-fixing and phosphorous-releasing microscopic organisms which normally lived in symbiosis with Earth plants. They would have been tested beforehand for their ability to compete with indigenous bacterial life. And then Earth-plants would have been seeded.
They had been. Calhoun saw that inimitable green which a man somehow always recognizes. It is the green of plants whose ancestors throve on Earth and have followed that old planet’s children halfway across the galaxy.
“The population must be practically nothing,” growled Calhoun, “because it doesn’t show. But the part of it in the city wants to keep whatever’s happened from the Med Service. Hm-m-m. They’re not dying, or they’d want help. But at least one dead man wasn’t in the city where he belonged, and he could have used some help! Maybe there are more like him.”
Murgatroyd said,
“Chee!”
“If there are two kinds of people here,” added Calhoun darkly, “they might be - antagonistic to each other.”
He stared with knitted brows over the vast expanse toward the horizon. Murgatroyd had halted a little behind him. He stood up on his hind legs and stared intently off to one side. He shaded his eyes with a forepaw in a singularly humanlike fashion and looked inquisitively at something he saw. But Calhoun did not notice.
“Make a guess, Murgatroyd,” said Calhoun. “There are at least a few people in the city who don’t want something known to the Med Service. So whatever’s the matter, it’s not fatal to them. There may be people wandering about like that poor devil we found. Something was fatal to him! Where’d we find more of his type? Since they haven’t tried to kill me, we might make friends.”
Murgatroyd did not answer. He stared absorbedly at a patch of underbrush some fifty yards to the left.
Calhoun shrugged and started down the hillside. Murgatroyd remained fixed in a pose of intensely curious attention to the patch of brush. Calhoun went on down the farther hillside. His back was toward the brush-thicket.
There was a deep-toned, musical twanging sound from the thicket. Calhoun’s body jerked violently as an impact sounded. He stumbled and went down, with the shaft of a wooden projectile sticking out of his pack. He lay still.
Murgatroyd whimpered. He rushed to where Calhoun lay upon the ground. He danced in agitation, chattering shrilly. He wrung his paws in humanlike distress. He whimpered and chattered together. He tugged at Calhoun. Calhoun made no response,
A figure came out of the thicket. It was gaunt and thin, yet Its garments had once been of admirable quality. It carried a strange and utterly primitive weapon. It moved toward Calhoun without lightness, but with a dreary resolution.
It bent over him and laid a hand to the wooden projectile it had fired into his back.
Calhoun moved suddenly. He grappled. The gaunt figure toppled, and he swarmed upon it savagely as it struggled. But it was taken by surprise. Pantings sounded, and Murgatroyd danced in a fever of anxiety.
Then Calhoun stood up quickly. He stared down at the emaciated figure which had tried to murder him from ambush. That figure panted horribly, now.
“Really,” said Calhoun in a professional tone, “as a doctor I’d say that you should be in bed instead of wandering around trying to murder total strangers. When did this trouble begin? I’m going to take your temperature and your pulse. Murgatroyd and I have been hoping to find someone like you. The only other human being I’ve seen on this planet wasn’t able to talk.”
He swung his shoulder pack around and impatiently jerked a sharp-pointed stick out of it. It was the missile, which had been stopped by the pack. He brought out his lab kit. With absolute absorption in the task, he prepared to make a swift check of his would-be murderer’s state of health.
It was not good. There was already marked emaciation. The desperately panting young woman’s eyes were deep-sunk: hollow. She gasped and gasped. Still gasping, she lapsed into unconsciousness.
“Here,” said Calhoun curtly, “you enter the picture, Murgatroyd. This is the sort of thing you’re designed to handle!”
He set to work briskly. But presently he said over his shoulder:
“Besides a delicate digestion and a hair-trigger antibody system, Murgatroyd, you ought to have the instincts of a watchdog. I don’t like coming that close to being speared by my patients. See if there’s anybody else around, won’t you?”
“Chee!” said Murgatroyd shrilly. But he didn’t understand. He watched as Calhoun deftly drew a small sample of blood from the unconscious young woman and painstakingly put half the tiny quantity into an almost microscopic ampule in the lab kit. Then he moved toward Murgatroyd.
The tormal wriggled as Calhoun made the injection. But it did not hurt. There was an insensitive spot on his flank where the pain-nerves had been blocked off before he was a week old.
“As one medical man to another,” said Calhoun, “what’s a good treatment for anoxia when you haven’t got any oxygen? You don’t know? Neither do I. But we’ve found out why those chaps in the city tried to shake us to bits, out in space.”
He swore in a sudden, bitter anger. Then he looked quickly at the girl, concerned lest she’d heard.
She hadn’t. She was still unconscious.
* * * *
III
That pattern of human conduct which is loosely called “self-respecting” has the curious property of restricting to the individual - through his withdrawal of acts to communicate misfortune - the unfavorable chance occurrences which probability insists must take place. On the other hand, the same pattern of human conduct tends to disseminate and to share chance favorable occurrences among the group. The members of a group of persons practicing “self-respect,” then, increase the mathematical probability of good fortune to all their number. This explains the instability of cultures in which principles leading to this type of behaviour become obsolete. A decadent society brings bad luck upon itself by the operation of the laws of probability . . .
Probability and Human Conduct, FITZGERALD
She came very slowly back to consciousness. It was almost as if she waked from utterly exhausted sleep. When she first opened her eyes, they wandered vaguely until they fell upon Calhoun. Then a bitter and contemptuous hatred filled them. Her hand fumbled weakly to the knife at her waist. It was not a good weapon. It had been table-cutlery and the handle was much too slender to permit a grip by which somebody could be killed. Calhoun bent over and took the knife away from her. It had been ground unskillfully to a point.
“In my capacity as your doctor,” he told her, “I must forbid you to stab me. It wouldn’t be good for you.” Then he said, “Look! My name’s Calhoun. I came from Sector Med Headquarters to make a planetary health inspection, and some lads in the city apparently didn’t want a Med Ship aground. So they tried to kill me by buttering me all over the walls of my ship, with the landing-grid field. I made what was practically a crash landing, and now I need to know what’s up.”
The burning hatred remained in her eyes, but there was a trace of doubt.
“Here,” said Calhoun, “is my identification.”
He showed her the highly official documents which gave him vast authority - where a planetary government was willing to concede it.
“Of course,” he added, “papers can be stolen. But I have a witness that I’m what and who I say I am. You’ve he
ard of tormals? Murgatroyd will vouch for me.”
He called his small and furry companion. Murgatroyd advanced and politely offered a small, prehensile paw. He said “Chee” in a shrill voice, and then solemnly took hold of the girl’s wrist in imitation of Calhoun’s previous action of feeling her pulse.
Calhoun watched. The girl stared at Murgatroyd. But all the galaxy had heard of tormals. They’d been found on a planet in the Deneb region, and they were engaging pets and displayed an extraordinary immunity to the diseases men were apt to scatter in their interstellar journeyings. A forgotten Med Service researcher made an investigation on the ability of tormals to live in contact with men. He came up with a discovery which made them very much too valuable to have their lives wasted in mere sociability. There were still not enough of Murgatroyd’s kind to meet the need that men had of them, and laymen had to forego their distinctly charming society. So Murgatroyd was an identification.
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