Calhoun dropped an odorous pellet on the ground and moved away on a compass course. He had a hand lamp, which he used sparingly. There were tree trunks to run into and roots to stumble over and much brushwood to be thrust through. Ultimately he came upon a highway. He deposited a pellet. With his hand lamp off, he searched as much of the sky as he could. He concluded that there was a faint glow in the sky to southward. He set out along the highway toward it.
It was not less than four miles away, and then there was a small town, and it seemed lifeless. Street lights burned, but there were no lighted windows anywhere. There was no motion.
He moved cautiously among its streets. Here and there he saw a sign, “Quarantine.” He nodded. Things had gotten really bad! Normal sanitary measures would prevent the spread of contagion of a normal kind. When infections led to the quarantine of every house where plague appeared, it meant that doctors were getting panicky and old-fashioned. However, the ideas of the causes of pestilences would remain modern. Nobody would suspect an epidemic of being actually a crime.
He found a merchandise center. He found a food shop. All the night was dark and silent. He listened for a long, long time, and then committed burglary.
With his hand lamp turned down to the faintest of glimmers, he began to accumulate parcels. There was plague in this area and this town. Therefore, he painstakingly picked out parcels of every variety of foodstuff in the food shop’s stock. He stuffed his loot into a bag. He carried everything, even salt and sugar and coffee, meat, bread, and vegetables in their transparent coverings. He took a sample—the smallest possible—of everything he could find.
He piously laid an interstellar currency note on the checkout desk. He left. He went back to the highway by which he’d arrived. He trudged four miles to where a pellet designed for something else made a distinctive patch of unpleasant smell. He turned and traveled by compass until he found another evil-smelling spot. Again by compass…and he arrived back at the Med Ship. He went in.
Murgatroyd greeted him with inarticulate cries, embracing his legs and protesting vehemently of his sufferings during Calhoun’s absence. To keep from stepping on him, Calhoun tripped. The bag of his burglarized acquisitions fell. It broke. Something smashed.
“Stop it!” commanded Calhoun firmly. “I missed you too. But I’ve got work to do, and I didn’t run across any ditch water. I’ve got to go out again.”
He forcibly prevented Murgatroyd from going with him, and he spent an hour fumbling for a swampy spot in the dark forest. In the end he packed up damp and half-rotted woods-mold. He carried that back to the ship. Then he began to collect the grocery packages he’d dropped. A package of coffee beans had broken.
“Damn!” said Calhoun.
He gathered up the spilled beans. Murgatroyd assisted. Murgatroyd adored coffee. Calhoun found him popping the beans into his mouth and chewing in high delight.
He went about the essential, mundane labor he’d envisioned. He prepared what a physician of much older times would have called a decoction of rotted leaves. He examined it with a microscope. It was admirable! There were paramecia and rotifers and all sorts of agile microscopic creatures floating, swimming, squirming and darting about in the faintly brownish solution.
“Now,” said Calhoun, “we will see if we see anything.”
He put the fraction of a drop of a standard and extremely mild antiseptic on the microscope slide. The rotifers and the paramecia and the fauna of the ditch water died. Which, of course, was to be expected. Single-celled animals are killed by concentrations of poison which are harmless to greater animals. Antiseptics are poisons and poisons are antiseptics, but antiseptics are poisons only in massive doses. But to a rotifer or to paramecia all doses are massive.
“Therefore,” explained Calhoun to a watching and inquisitive Murgatroyd, “I act more like an alchemist than a sane man. I feel apologetic, Murgatroyd. I am embarrassed to make decoctions and to mix them with synthesized ditch water. But what else can I do? I have to identity the cause of the plague here, without having contact with a single patient because Doctor Kelo…”
He shrugged and continued his activities. He was making solutions, decoctions, infusions of every kind of foodstuff the food shop he’d burglarized contained. The plague was not caused by an agent itself infectious. It was caused by something which allowed infections to thrive unhindered in human bodies. So Calhoun made soups of meat, all the kinds of meat, of grain and grain products, and of vegetables taken from their transparent coverings. Even such items as sugar, salt, pepper and coffee were included.
Those solutions went upon microscope slides, one by one. With each, in turn, Calhoun mingled the decoction of rotting vegetation which was, apparently, as well-suited for his research as stagnant water from a scummy pond. The animalcules of the decoction appreciated their diverse food supplies. They fed. They throve. Given time, they would have multiplied prodigiously.
Eventually Calhoun came to the solution of coffee. He mixed it with his experimental microscopic-animal zoo, and the paramecia died. Rotifers ceased to whirl and dart about upon their sub-miniature affairs. When an infusion of coffee from the food shop was added to the liquid environment of one-celled animals, they died.
Calhoun checked. It was so. He made an infusion of coffee from the Med Ship’s stores. It was not so. Coffee from the ship was not fatal to paramecia. Coffee from the shop was. But it would not follow that coffee from the shop would be fatal to humans. The alcoholic content of beer is fatal to paramecia. Wine is a fair antiseptic. No! The food store coffee could very well be far less toxic than the mildest of mouthwashes, and still kill the contents of Calhoun’s ditch-water zoo.
However, the point was that something existed which allowed infections to thrive unhindered in human bodies. Something that destroyed the body’s defenses against infections. Nothing more would be needed to make the appearance of a plague. Every human being carries with him the seeds of infection, from oral bacteria to intestinal flora, and even often streptococci in the hair follicles of the skin. Destroy the body’s means of defense and anyone was bound to develop one of the diseases whose sample bacteria he carries about with him.
Instantly one ceased to think of the plague on Kryder II—and Castor IV before it—instantly one ceased to think of the epidemic as an infection miraculously spreading without any germ or bacterium or virus to carry it, instantly one thought of it as a toxin only, a poison only, a compound as monstrously fatal as the toxin of—say—the bacillus clostridium botulinum—immediately everything fell into place. The toxin that could simulate a plague could be distributed on a foodstuff: grain or meat or neatly packaged coffee. It would be distributed in such dilution that it was harmless. It would not be detected by any culture-medium process. In such concentration as humans would receive, it would have one effect, and one effect only. It would hinder the body’s formation of antibodies. It would prevent the production of those compounds which destroy infective agents to which human beings are exposed. It would simply make certain that no infection would be fought. Antibodies introduced from outside could cure a disease the body could not resist, but there would always be other diseases…Yet, in a concentration greater than body fluids could contain, it killed the creatures that thrived in ditch water.
Calhoun consulted the slip of paper the computer had printed out for him. He went down to the ship’s stores. A Med Ship carries an odd assortment of supplies. Here were the basic compounds from which an unlimited number of other compounds could be synthesized. With the computer-slip for a prescription form, he picked out certain ones. He went back to the ditch-water samples presently. He worked very painstakingly. Presently, he had a whitish powder. He made a dilute—a very dilute solution of it. He added that solution to ditch water. The paramecia and rotifers and other tiny creatures swam about in bland indifference. He put in a trace of coffee decoction. Presently, he was trying to find out how small a quantity of his new solution, added to the coffee infusion, made it har
mless to paramecia.
It was not an antidote to the substance the coffee contained. It did not counter the effects of that monstrously toxic substance, but it combined with that substance. It destroyed it; it was the answer to the plague on Kryder II.
It was broad daylight when he’d finished the horribly tedious detail work the problem had required. In fact, it was close to sundown. He said tiredly to Murgatroyd, “Well, we’ve got it!”
Murgatroyd did not answer. Calhoun did not notice for a moment or so. Then he jerked his head about.
Murgatroyd lay on the Med Ship floor, his eyes half closed. His breath came in quick, shallow pantings.
He’d eaten coffee beans when they fell on the floor of the control-room. Calhoun picked him up, his lips angrily compressed. Murgatroyd neither resisted nor noticed. Calhoun examined him with a raging, painstaking care.
Murgatroyd was ill. He came of a tribe which was never sick of any infectious disease; they reacted with explosive promptness to any trace of contagion and produced antibodies which would destroy any invading pathogen. His digestive system was normally no less efficient, rejecting any substance which was unwholesome. But the toxic compound which caused the plague on Kryder II was not unwholesome in any direct sense. It did not kill anybody, by itself. It simply inhibited, it prevented, the formation of those antibodies which are a creature’s defense against disease.
Murgatroyd had a fully developed case of pneumonia. It had developed faster in him than in a human being. It was horribly more severe. He’d developed it from some single diplococcus pneumonia upon his fur, or perhaps on Calhoun’s garments, or possibly from the floor or wall of the Med Ship. Such microorganisms are everywhere. Humans and animals are normally immune to any but massive infection. But Murgatroyd was at the very point of death from a disease his tribe normally could not—could not!—contract.
Calhoun made the tests required to make him absolutely certain. Then he took his new solution and prepared to make use of it.
“Fortunately, Murgatroyd,” he said grimly, “we’ve something to try for this situation. Hold still!”
VI
Murgatroyd sipped a cup of coffee with infinite relish. He finished it. He licked the last drop. He offered it to Calhoun and said inquiringly, “Chee?”
“It probably won’t hurt you to have one more cup,” said Calhoun. He added irrelevantly, “I’m very glad you’re well, Murgatroyd!”
Murgatroyd said complacently, “Chee-chee!”
Then the space communicator said metallically, “Calling Med Ship! Calling Med Ship! Calling Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty! Ground calling Aesclipus Twenty!”
The Med Ship was then in orbit around Kryder II. It was a sound, high orbit, comfortably beyond atmosphere. Calhoun was officially waiting for word of how his communication and instruction to the authorities aground had turned out. He said, “Well?”
“I’m the Planetary Health Minister,” said a voice. Somehow it sounded infinitely relieved. “I’ve just had reports from six of our hospitals. They check with what you told us. The paramecia test works. There were a number of different foods—ah—contaminated at their packaging points, so that even if someone had identified one food as the cause of the plague in one place, in another area it wouldn’t be true. It was clever! It was damnably clever! And of course we’ve synthesized your reagent and tried it on laboratory animals we were able—by your instructions—to give the plague.”
“I hope,” said Calhoun politely, “that the results were satisfactory.”
The other man’s voice broke suddenly.
“One of my children…he will probably recover, now. He’s weak. He’s terribly weak! But he’ll almost certainly live, now that we can protect him from reinfection. We’ve started planet-wide use of your reagent.”
“Correction,” said Calhoun. “It’s not my reagent. It is a perfectly well-known chemical compound. It’s not often used, and perhaps this is its first use medically, but it’s been known for half a century. You’ll find it mentioned…”
The voice at the other end of the communication link said fiercely, “You will excuse me if I say nonsense! I wanted to report that everything you’ve told us has proved true. We have very many desperately ill, but new patients have already responded to medication to counter the—contamination of food they’d taken. They’ve gotten thoroughly well of normal disease and haven’t developed others. Our doctors are elated. They are convinced. You can’t have any idea how relieved…”
Calhoun glanced at Murgatroyd and said dryly, “I’ve reason to be pleased myself. How about Doctor Kelo and his friends?”
“We’ll get him! He can’t get off the planet, and we’ll find him! There’s only one ship aground at the spaceport; it came in two days ago. It’s stayed in port under self-quarantine at our request. We’ve instructed it not to take anyone aboard. We’re chartering it to go to other planets and buy foodstuffs to replace the ones we’re testing and destroying.”
Calhoun, stroking Murgatroyd, said more dryly than before, “I wouldn’t. You’d have to send currency to pay for the stuff you want to import. On two previous occasions very, very large sums gathered for that purpose have disappeared. I’m no policeman but that could be the reason for the plague. There are some people who might start a plague for the express purpose of being entrusted with some scores of millions of credits…”
There was silence at the other end of the conversation. Then a man’s voice, raging, “If that’s it!”
Calhoun broke in.
“In my orbit I’ll be below your horizon in minutes. I’ll call back. My orbit’s very close to two hours duration.”
“If that’s it,” repeated the voice, raging, “We’ll…”
There was silence. Calhoun said very cheerfully, “Murgatroyd, I’m good at guessing the way a relatively honest man’s mind works. If I’d told them earlier that the plague victims were murdered, they’d have discounted the rest of what I had to say. But I’m learning the way a criminal’s mind works too! It takes a criminal to think of burning down a house to cover up the fact that he robbed it. It takes a criminal to think of killing a man for what he may carry in his pockets. It would take a criminal to start a plague so he can gather money to steal, under the pretense that he’s going to use it to buy unpoisoned food to replace the food he’s poisoned. I had trouble understanding that!”
Murgatroyd said, “Chee!”
He got up. He walked in a rather wobbly fashion as if testing his strength. He came back and nestled against Calhoun. Calhoun petted him. Murgatroyd yawned. He’d been weakened by his illness. He still didn’t understand it. Tormals are not accustomed to being ill.
“Now,” said Calhoun reflectively, “I make a guess at how certain criminal minds will work if they eavesdropped just then. We’ve spoiled their crime on Kryder II. They’d put a lot of time and trouble into committing it. Now they’ve had their trouble and committed their murders for nothing. I think, I think they’ll be angry. With me.”
He settled Murgatroyd comfortably. He went about the ship stowing things away. The samples of ditch water and of foodstuffs he placed so no shock or sudden acceleration could spill them. He made sure there were no loose objects about the control-room. He went down below and made especially sure that the extra plastic-sealed control-central unit was properly stowed, and that the spacesuit worn by one of the two men to board the Med Ship at breakout was suitably held fast. They’d be turned over to the laboratories at Headquarters. If carefully disassembled the control-central unit would give positive proof that a certain man in the Headquarters technical staff had installed it. Suitable measures would be taken. The spacesuit would identify the man now at the bottom of a rocky crevasse on an icy, uninhabited world.
By the time Calhoun’s preparations were finished, the ship had nearly completed its orbital round. Calhoun put Murgatroyd in his cubbyhole. He fastened the door so the little animal couldn’t be thrown out. He went to the pilot’s chair and strapped in.
Presently he called, “Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty calling ground! Med Ship calling ground!”
An enraged voice answered immediately.
“Ground to Med Ship! You were right! The ship in the spaceport lifted off on emergency rockets before we could stop it! It must have listened in when you talked to us before! It got below the horizon before we could lock on!”
“Ah!” said Calhoun comfortably. “And did Doctor Kelo get aboard?”
“He did!” raged the voice. “He did! It’s inexcusable! It’s unbelievable! He did get aboard and we moved to seize the ship and its rockets flamed and it got away!”
“Ah!” said Calhoun, again comfortably. “Then give me coordinates for landing.”
He had them repeated. Of course, if someone were eavesdropping…but he shifted the Med Ship’s orbit to bring him to rendezvous at a certain spot at a certain time, a certain very considerable distance out from the planet.
“Now,” he said to Murgatroyd, “we’ll see if I understand the psychology of the criminal classes! In fact…”
Then he remembered that Murgatroyd was locked in his cubbyhole. He shrugged. He sat very alertly in the pilot’s chair while the planet Kryder II revolved beneath him.
There was silence except for those minute noises a ship has to make to keep from seeming like the inside of a tomb. Murmurings. Musical notes. The sound of traffic. All very faint but infinitely companionable.
The needle of the nearest-object dial stirred from where it had indicated the distance to the planet’s surface. Something else was nearer. It continued to approach. Calhoun found it and swung the Med Ship to face it, but he waited. Presently, he saw an infinitesimal sliver of reflected sunlight against the background of distant stars. He mentally balanced this fact against that, this possibility against that.
He flicked on the electron telescope. Yes. There were minute objects following the other ship. More of them appeared, and still more. They were left behind by the other ship’s acceleration, but they spread out like a cone of tiny, deadly, murderous missiles. They were. If any one crashed into the Med Ship it could go clear through from end to end.
First Contacts: The Essential Murray Leinster Page 56