The Second Science Fiction Megapack

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  The landing-grid operator shook hands first.

  “Nice going! It could be lucky that you arrived. We normals need some luck!”

  He introduced a man in civilian clothes as the planetary Minister for Health. A man in uniform was head of the planetary police. The others weren’t introduced.

  “We worked fast after your call came!” said the grid operator. “Things are lined up for you, but they’re bad!”

  “I’ve been wondering,” admitted Calhoun dryly, “if all incoming ships are greeted with rockets.”

  “That’s the paras,” said the police head, grimly. “They’d rather not have a Med Service man here.”

  * * * *

  A ground car sped across the spaceport. It came at a headlong pace toward the group just outside the Med Ship. There was a sudden howl of a siren by the spaceport gate. A second car leaped as if to intercept the first. Its siren screamed again. Then bright sparks appeared near the first car’s windows. Blasters rasped. Incredulously, Calhoun saw the blue-white of blaster bolts darting toward him. The men about him clawed for weapons. The grid operator said sharply:

  “Get in your ship! We’ll take care of this! It’s paras!”

  But Calhoun stood still. It was instinct not to show alarm. Actually, he didn’t feel it. This was too preposterous! He tried to grasp the situation and fearfulness does not help at such a time.

  A bolt crackled against the Med Ship’s hull just beyond him. Blasters rasped from beside him. A bolt exploded almost at Calhoun’s feet. There were two men in the first-moving ground car, and now that another car moved to head them off, one fired desperately and the other tried to steer and fire at the same time. The siren-sounding car send a stream of bolts at them. But both cars jounced and bounced. There could be no marksmanship under such conditions.

  But a bolt did hit. The two-man car dipped suddenly to one side. Its fore part touched ground. It slued around, and its rear part lifted. It flung out its two passengers and with an effect of great deliberation it rolled over end for end and came to a stop upside down. Of its passengers, one lay still. The other struggled to his feet and began to run—toward Calhoun. He fired desperately, again and again——

  Bolts from the pursuing car struck all round him. Then one struck him. He collapsed.

  Calhoun’s hands clenched. Automatically, he moved toward the other still figure, to act as a medical man does when somebody is hurt. The grid operator seized his arm. As Calhoun jerked to get free, that second man stirred His blaster lifted and rasped. The little pellet of ball-lightning grazed Calhoun’s side, burning away his uniform down to the skin, just as there was a grating roar of blaster fire. The second man died.

  “Are you crazy?” demanded the grid operator angrily. “He was a para! He was here to try to kill you!”

  The police head snapped:

  “Get that car sprayed! See if it had equipment to spread contagion! Spray everything it went near! And hurry!”

  There was silence as men came from the spaceport building. They pushed a tank on wheels before them. It had a hose and a nozzle attached to it. They began to use the hose to make a thick, foglike, heavy mist which clung to the ground and lingered there. The spray had the biting smell of phenol.

  “What’s going on here?” demanded Calhoun angrily. “Damnation! What’s going on here?”

  The Minister for Health said unhappily:

  “Why…we’ve a public-health situation we haven’t been able to meet. It appears to be an epidemic of…of…we’re not sure what, but it looks like demoniac possession.”

  CHAPTER II

  “I’d like,” said Calhoun, “a definition. Just what do you mean by a para?”

  Murgatroyd echoed his tone in an indignant, “Chee-chee!”

  This was twenty minutes later. Calhoun had gone back into the Med Ship and treated the blaster burn on his side. He’d changed his clothing from the scorched uniform to civilian garb. It would not look eccentric here. Men’s ordinary garments were extremely similar all over the galaxy. Women’s clothes were something else.

  Now he and Murgatroyd rode in a ground car with four armed men of the planetary police, plus the civilian who’d been introduced as the Minister for Health for the planet. The car sped briskly toward the spaceport gate. Masses of thick gray fog still clung to the ground where the would-be assassins’ car lay on its back and where the bodies of the two dead men remained. The mist was being spread everywhere—everywhere the men had touched ground or where their car had run.

  Calhoun had some experience with epidemics and emergency measures for destroying contagion. He had more confidence in the primitive sanitary value of fire. It worked, no matter how ancient the process of burning things might be. But very many human beings, these days, never saw a naked flame unless in a science class at school, where it might be shown as a spectacularly rapid reaction of oxidation. But people used electricity for heat and light and power. Mankind had moved out of the age of fire. So here on Tallien it seemed inevitable that infective material should be sprayed with antiseptics instead of simply set ablaze.

  “What,” repeated Calhoun doggedly, “is a para?”

  The Health Minister said unhappily:

  “Paras are…beings that once were sane men. They aren’t sane any longer. Perhaps they aren’t men any longer. Something has happened to them. If you’d landed a day or two later, you couldn’t have landed at all. We normals had planned to blow up the landing grid so no other ship could land and be lifted off again to spread the…contagion to other worlds. If it is a contagion.”

  “Smashing the landing grid,” said Calhoun practically, “may be all right as a last resort. But surely there are other things to be tried first!”

  Then he stopped. The ground car in which he rode had reached the spaceport gate. Three other ground cars waited there. One swung into motion ahead of them. The other two took up positions behind. A caravan of four cars, each bristling with blast weapons, swept along the wide highway which began here at the spaceport and stretched straight across level ground toward the city whose towers showed on the horizon. The other cars formed a guard for Calhoun. He’d needed protection before, and he might need it again.

  “Medically,” he said to the Minister for Health, “I take it that a para is the human victim of some condition which makes him act insanely. That is pretty vague. You say it hasn’t been controlled. That leaves everything very vague indeed. How widely spread is it? Geographically, I mean.”

  “Paras have appeared,” said the Minister for Health, “at every place on Tallien Three where there are men.”

  “It’s epidemic, then,” said Calhoun professionally. “You might call it pandemic. How many cases?”

  “We guess at thirty per cent of the population—so far,” said the Minister for Health, hopelessly. “But every day the total goes up.” He added: “Dr. Lett has some hope for a vaccine, but it will be too late for most.”

  Calhoun frowned. With reasonably modern medical techniques, almost any sort of infection should be stopped long before there were as many cases as that!

  “When did it start? How long has it been running?”

  “The first paras were examined six months ago,” said the Health Minister. “It was thought to be a disease. Our best physicians examined them. They couldn’t agree on a cause, they couldn’t find a germ or a virus.…”

  “Symptoms?” asked Calhoun crisply.

  “Dr. Lett phrased them in medical terms,” said the Minister for Health. “The condition begins with a period of great irritability or depression. The depression is so great that suicide is not infrequent. If that doesn’t happen, there’s a period of suspiciousness and secretiveness—strongly suggestive of paranoia. Then there’s a craving for—unusual food. When it becomes uncontrollable, the patient is mad!”

  * * * *

  The ground cars sped toward the city. A second group of vehicles appeared, waiting. As the four-car caravan swept up to them, one swung in front of
the car in which Calhoun and Murgatroyd rode. The others fell into line to the rear. It began to look like a respectable fighting force.

  “And after madness?” Calhoun asked.

  “Then they’re paras!” said the Health Minister. “They crave the incredible. They feed on the abominable. And they hate us normals as—devils out of hell would hate us!”

  “And after that again?” said Calhoun. “I mean, what’s the prognosis? Do they die or recover? If they recover, in how long? If they die, how soon?”

  “They’re paras!” said the Health Minister querulously. “I’m no physician! I’m an administrator! But I don’t think any recover. Certainly none die of it! They stay—what they’ve become.”

  “My experience,” said Calhoun, “has been mostly with diseases that one either recovers from or dies of. A disease whose victims organize to steal weather rockets and to use them to destroy a ship—only they failed—and who carry on with an assassination attempt…that doesn’t sound like a disease! A disease has no purpose of its own. They had a purpose—as if they obeyed one of their number.”

  The Minister for Health said uneasily:

  “It’s been suggested—that something out of the jungle causes what’s happened. On other planets there are creatures who drink blood without waking their victims. There are reptiles who sting men. There are even insects which sting men and inject diseases. Something like that seems to have come out of the jungle. While men sleep—something happens to them! They turn into paras. Something native to this world must be responsible. The planet did not welcome us. There’s not a native plant or beast that is useful to us! We have to culture soil-bacteria so Earth-type plants can grow here! We don’t begin to know all the creatures of the jungle! If something comes out and makes men paras without their knowledge—”

  Calhoun said mildly:

  “It would seem that such things could be discovered.”

  The Health Minister said bitterly:

  “Not this thing! It is intelligent! It hides! It acts as if on a plan to destroy us! Why…there was a young doctor who said he’d cured a para! But we found him and the former para dead when we went to check his claim! Things from the jungle had killed them! They think! They know! They understand! They’re rational, and like devils—”

  * * * *

  A third group of ground cars appeared ahead, waiting. Like the others, they were filled with men holding blast rifles. They joined the procession—the rushing, never-pausing group of cars from the spaceport. The highway had obviously been patrolled against a possible ambush or road block. The augmented combat group went on.

  “As a medical man,” said Calhoun carefully, “I question the existence of a local, nonhuman rational creature. Creatures develop or adapt to fit their environment. They change or develop to fit into some niche, some special place in the ecological system which is their environment. If there is no niche and no room for a specific creature in an environment, there is no such creature there! And there cannot be a place in any environment for a creature which will change it. It would be a contradiction in terms! We rational humans change the worlds we occupy! Any rational creature will! So a rational animal is as nearly impossible as any creature can be. It’s true that we’ve happened, but—another rational race? Oh, no!”

  Murgatroyd said:

  “Chee!”

  The city’s towers loomed higher and taller above the horizon. Then, abruptly, the fast-moving cavalcade came to the edge of the city and plunged into it.

  It was not a normal city. The buildings were not eccentric. All planets, but very new ones, show local architectural peculiarities, so it was not odd to see all windows topped by triple arches, or quite useless pilasters in the brick walls of apartment buildings. These would have made the city seem only individual. But it was not normal. The streets were not clean. Two windows in three had been smashed. In placed Calhoun saw doors that had been broken in and splintered, and never repaired. That implied violence unrestrained. The streets were almost empty. Occasional figures might be seen on the sidewalks before the speeding ground cars, but the vehicles never passed them. Pedestrians turned corners or dodged into doorways before the cavalcade could overtake them.

  The buildings grew taller. The street level remained empty of humans, but now and again, many stories up, heads peered out of windows. Then high-pitched yellings came from aloft. It was not possible to tell whether they were yells of defiance or derision or despair, but they were directed at the racing cars.

  Calhoun looked quickly at the faces of the men around him. The Minister for Health looked at once heartbroken and embittered. The head of the planetary police stared grimly ahead. Screechings and howlings echoed and re-echoed between the building walls. Objects began to fall from the windows: bottles, pots and pans. Chairs and stools twirled and spun, hurtling downward. Everything that was loose and could be thrown from a window came down, flung by the occupants of those high dwellings. With them came outcries which were assuredly cursings.

  It occurred to Calhoun that there had been a period in history when mob-action invariably meant flames. Men burned what they hated and what they feared. They also burned religious offerings to divers bloodthirsty deities. It was fortunate, he reflected wryly, that fires were no longer a matter of common experience, or burning oil and flaming missiles would have been flung down on the ground cars.

  “Is this unpopularity yours?” he asked. “Or do I have a share in it? Am I unwelcome to some parts of the population?”

  “You’re unwelcome to paras,” said the police head coldly. “Paras don’t want you here. Whatever drives them is afraid the Med Service might make them no longer paras. And they want to stay the way they are.” His lips twisted. “They aren’t making this uproar, though. We gathered everybody we were sure wasn’t…infected into Government Center. These people were left out. We weren’t sure about them. So they consider we’ve left them to become paras and they don’t like it!”

  Calhoun frowned again. This confused everything. There was talk of infection, and talk of unseen creatures come out of the jungle, making men paras and then controlling them as if by demoniac possession. There were few human vagaries, though, that were not recorded in the Med Service files. Calhoun remembered something, and wanted to be sick. It was like an infection, and like possession by devils, too. There would be creatures not much removed from fields involved, anyhow.

  “I think,” he said, “that I need to talk to your counter-para researchers. You have men working on the problem?”

  “We did,” said the police head, grimly. “But most of them turned para. We thought they’d be more dangerous than other paras, so we shot them. But it did no good. Paras still turn up, in Government Center, too! Now we only send paras out the south gate. They doubtless make out—as paras.”

  * * * *

  For a time there was silence in the rushing cars, though a bedlam of howls and curses came from aloft. Then a sudden shrieking of foreseen triumph came from overhead. A huge piece of furniture, a couch, seemed certain to crash into the car in which Calhoun rode. But it swerved sharply, ran up on the sidewalk, and the couch dashed itself to splinters where the car should have been. The car went down to the pavement once more and rushed on.

  The street ended. A high barrier of masonry rose up at a cross street. It closed the highway and connected the walls of apartment buildings on either hand. There was a gate in it, and the leading car drew off to one side and the car carrying Calhoun and Murgatroyd ran through, and there was a second barrier ahead, but this was closed. The other cars filed in after it, Calhoun saw that windows in these apartment buildings had been bricked up. They made a many-storied wall shutting off all that was beyond them.

  Men from the barrier went from car to car of the escort, checking men who had been the escort for Calhoun. The Minister for Health said jerkily:

  “Everybody in Government Center is examined at least once each day to see if they’re turning para or not. Those showing symp
toms are turned out the south gate. Everybody, myself included, has to have a fresh certificate every twenty-four hours.”

  The inner gate swung wide. The car carrying Calhoun went through. The buildings about them ended. They were in a huge open space that must once have been a park in the center of the city. There were structures which could not possibly be other than government buildings. But the population of this world was small. They were not grandiose. There were walkways and some temporary buildings obviously thrown hastily together to house a sudden influx of people.

  And here there were many people. There was bright sunshine, and children played and women watched them. There were some—not many—men in sight, but most of them were elderly. All the young ones were uniformed and hastily going here or there. And though the children played gaily, there were few smiles to be seen on adult faces.

  “I take it,” said Calhoun, “that this is Government Center, where you collected everybody in the city you were sure was normal. But they don’t all stay normal. And you consider that it isn’t exactly an infection but the result of something that’s done to them by—Something.”

  “Many of our doctors thought so,” said the Minister for Health. “But they’ve turned para. Maybe the…Things got at them because they were close to the truth.”

  His head sank forward on his chest. The police head said briefly:

  “When you want to go back to your ship, say so and we’ll take you. If you can’t do anything for us, you’ll warn other planets not to send ships here.”

  The ground car braked before one of those square, unornamented buildings which are laboratories everywhere in the galaxy. The Minister for Health got out. Calhoun followed him, Murgatroyd riding on his shoulder. The ground car went away and Calhoun followed into the building.

  * * * *

  There was a sentry by the door, and an officer of the police. He examined the Minister’s one-day certificate of health. After various vision-phone calls, he passed Calhoun and Murgatroyd. They went a short distance and another sentry stopped them. A little farther, and another sentry.