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Ebook has 409 lines and 25733 words, and 9 pages

Illustrator: van Dongen

MED SERVICE

BY MURRAY LEINSTER

Illustrated by van Dongen

"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 ..."

Something stirred somewhere. There was a click, and a taped voice said:

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.

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."

"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.

Right now, Calhoun waited for an answer to his landing call. But he regarded the vast disk of the nearby planet.

His call was answered. A voice said incredulously on the space-phone speaker:

The voice said more incredulously still:

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:

Calhoun said very politely:

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.

"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 over-load 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.

He floated back to the control chair.

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-grid 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.

"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.

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--"

"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.

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