Read Ebook: Med Service by Leinster Murray Van Dongen H R Illustrator

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Ebook has 409 lines and 25733 words, and 9 pages

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.

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. The 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?"

"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--"

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.

Once Calhoun saw him interestedly bite a tiny bit out of a most unpromising looking shrub-stalk. He savored its flavor, 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 grew 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.

"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."

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.

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 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.

"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.

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:

"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."

"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?"

"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?"

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.

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-down 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.

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."

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