Pariah Planet Part 10

"I'm stupid, Maril, but you're touchy. There's nothing personal."

"There is to me!" she said fiercely. "I was born among blueskins, and they're of my blood, and they're hated and I'd have been killed on Weald if I'd been known as--what I am! And there's Korvan, who arranged for me to be sent away as a spy and advised me to do just what you said,--abandon my home world and everybody I care about! Including him!

It's personal to me!"

Calhoun wrinkled his forehead helplessly.

"I'm sorry," he repeated, "Drink your coffee!"

"I don't want it," she said bitterly. "I'd like to die!"

"If you stay around where I am," Calhoun told her, "you may get your wish. All right. There'll be no more questions, I promise."

She turned and moved toward the door to the sleeping-cabin. Calhoun looked after her.

"Maril," he called out to her.

"What?"

"Why were you crying?"

"You wouldn't understand," she said evenly.

Calhoun shrugged his shoulders almost up to his ears. He was a professional man. In his profession he was not incompetent. But there is no profession in which a really competent man tries to understand women.

Calhoun annoyedly had to let fate or chance or disaster take care of Maril's personal problems. He had larger matters to cope with.

But he had something to work on, now. He hunted busily in the reference tapes. He came up with an explicit collection of information on exactly the subject he needed. He left the control-room to go down into the storage areas of the Med Ship's hull. He found an ultra-frigid storage box, whose contents were kept at the temperature of liquid air. He donned thick gloves, used a special set of tongs, and extracted a tiny block of plastic in which a sealed-tight phial of gla.s.s was embedded. It frosted instantly he took it out, and when the storage-box was closed again the block was covered with a thick and opaque coating of frozen moisture.

He went back to the control-room and pulled down the panel which made available a small-scale but surprisingly adequate biological laboratory.

He set the plastic block in a container which would raise it very, very gradually to a specific temperature and hold it there. It was, obviously, a living culture from which any imaginable quant.i.ty of the same culture could be bred. Calhoun set the apparatus with great exact.i.tude.

"This," he told Murgatroyd, "may be a good day's work. Now I think I can rest."

Then, for a long while, there was no sound or movement in the Med Ship.

The girl Maril may have slept, or maybe not. Calhoun lay relaxed in a chair which at the touch of a b.u.t.ton became the most comfortable of sleeping-places. Murgatroyd remained in his cubbyhole, his tail curled over his nose. There were comforting, unheard, easily dismissable murmurings now and again. They kept the feeling of life alive in the ship. But for such infinitesimal stirrings of sound--carefully recorded for this exact purpose--the feel of the ship would have been that of a tomb.

But it was quite otherwise when another ship-day began with the taped sounds of morning activities as faint as echoes but nevertheless establishing an atmosphere of their own.

Calhoun examined the plastic block and its contents. He read the instruments which had cared for it while he slept. He put the block--no longer frosted--in the culture-microscope and saw its enclosed, infinitesimal particles of life in the process of multiplying on the food that had been frozen with them when they were reduced to the spore condition. He beamed. He replaced the block in the incubation oven and faced the day cheerfully.

Maril greeted him with great reserve. They breakfasted.

"I've been thinking," said Maril evenly. "I think I can get you a hearing for--whatever ideas you may have to help Dara."

"Kind of you," murmured Calhoun. "May I ask whose influence you'll exert?"

"There's a man," said Maril reservedly, "who--thinks a great deal of me.

I don't know his present official position, but he was certain to become prominent. I'll tell him how you've acted up to now, and your att.i.tude, and of course that you're Med Service. He'll be glad to help you, I'm sure."

"Splendid!" said Calhoun, nodding. "That will be Korvan."

She started.

"How did you know?"

"Intuition," said Calhoun drily. "All right. I'll count on him."

But he did not. He worked in the tiny biological lab all that ship-day and all the next. The girl remained quiet.

On the ship-day after, the time for breakfast approached. And while the ship was practically a world all by itself, it was easy to look forward with confidence to the future. But when contact and--in a fashion--conflict with other and larger worlds loomed nearer, prospects seemed less bright. Calhoun had definite plans, now, but there were so many ways in which they could be frustrated! Weald's political leaders could not oppose hysterical demands for action against blueskins, after a deathship arrived with no signs whatever of blueskins as responsible for its cargo of corpses. It was certain that a starving Dara would tend to desperate and fatal measures against hereditary enemies.

Calhoun sat down at the control-board and watched the clock.

"I've got things lined up," he told Maril wrily, "if only they work out.

_If_ I can make somebody on Dara listen and follow my advice and _if_ Weald doesn't get ideas and isn't doing what I suspect it is, maybe something can be done."

"I'm sure you'll do your best," said Maril politely.

Calhoun managed to grin. He watched the ship-clock. There was no sensation attached to overdrive travel except at the beginning and the end. It was now time for the end. He might find that absolutely anything had happened while he made plans which would immediately be seen to be hopeless. Weald could have sent ships to Dara, or Dara might be in such a state of desperation that ...

As it turned out, Dara was desperate. The Med Ship came out nearly a light-month from the sun about which the planet Dara revolved. Calhoun went into a short hop toward it. Then Dara was on the other side of the blazing yellow star. It took time to reach it. He called down, identifying himself and the ship and asking for coordinates so his ship could be brought to ground. There was confusion, as if the request were so unusual that the answers were not ready. The grid, too, was on the planet's night side. Presently the ship was locked onto by the grid's force-fields. It went downward without incident.

Calhoun saw that Maril sat tensely, twisting her fingers within each other, until the ship actually touched ground.

Then he opened the exit-port, and faced armed men in the darkness, with blast-rifles trained on him. There was a portable cannon trained on the Med Ship itself.

"Come out!" rasped a voice. "If you try anything you get blasted! Your ship and its contents are seized by the planetary government!"

CHAPTER 5

It seemed that the smell of hunger was in the air. The armed men were cadaverous. Lights came on, and stark, harsh shadows lay black upon the ground. Calhoun's captors were uniformed, but the uniforms hung loosely upon them. Where the lights struck upon their faces, their cheeks were hollow. They were emaciated. And there were the splotches of pigment of which Calhoun had heard. The leader of the truculent group was blue, except for two fingers which in the glaring illumination seemed whiter than white.

"Out!" said that man savagely. "We're taking over your stock of food.

You'll get your share of it, like everybody else, but--out!"

Maril spoke over Calhoun's shoulder. She uttered a cryptic sentence or two. It should have amounted to identification, but there was skepticism in the the armed party.

"Oh, you're one of us, eh?" said the guard-leader sardonically. "You'll have a chance to prove that! Come out of there!"

Calhoun spoke abruptly;

"This is a Med Ship," he said. "There are medicines and bacterial cultures, inside it. They shouldn't be meddled with. Here on Dara you've had enough of plagues!"