Pariah Planet Part 17

But a Med Ship man would also have known that it was simply one of those scrupulous precautions a Med Ship man takes when using cultures from store.

Calhoun put the sample away and called Maril back and offered no explanation. She said;

"I'll fix lunch." She hesitated. "You brought some food from the first Weald ship. Do you want it?"

He shook his head.

"I'm squeamish," he admitted. "The trouble on Dara is Med Service fault.

Before my time, but still--I'll stick to rations until everybody eats."

He watched her un.o.btrusively as the day went on. Presently he considered that she was slightly flushed. Shortly after the evening meal of singularly unappetizing Darian rations, she drank thirstily. He did not comment. He brought out cards and showed her a complicated game of solitaire in which mental arithmetic and expert use of probability increased one's chance of winning.

By midnight, ship-time, she'd learned the game and played it absorbedly.

Calhoun was able to scrutinize her without appearing to do so, and he was satisfied again. When he mentioned that the Med Ship should arrive off Dara in eight hours more, she put the cards away and went into the other cabin.

Calhoun wrote up the log. He added the notes that Maril had made for him, of Murgatroyd's pulse and blood-pressure after the injection of the same culture that produced fever and thirstiness in himself and later--without contact with him or the culture--in Maril. He put a professional comment at the end.

"The culture seems to have retained its normal characteristics during long storage in the spore state. It revived and reproduced rapidly. I injected .5 cc under my skin and in less than one hour my temperature was 30.8C. An hour later it was 30.9C. This was its peak. It immediately returned to normal. The only other observable symptom was slightly increased thirst. Blood-pressure and pulse remained normal. The other person in the Med Ship displayed the same symptoms, in prompt and complete repet.i.tion, without physical contact."

He went to sleep, with Murgatroyd curled up in his cubbyhole.

The Med Ship broke out of overdrive at 1300 hours, ship time. Calhoun made contact with the grid and was promptly lowered to the ground.

It was almost two hours later--1500 hours ship-time--when the people of Dara were informed by broadcast that Calhoun was publicly to be executed; immediately.

CHAPTER 7

From the viewpoint of Darians, the decision of Calhoun's guilt and the decision to execute him were reasonable enough. Maril protested fiercely, and her testimony agreed with Calhoun's in every respect, but from a blueskin viewpoint their own statements were d.a.m.ning.

Calhoun had taken four young astrogators to s.p.a.ce. They were the only semi-skilled s.p.a.ce-pilots Dara had. There were no fully qualified men.

Calhoun had asked for them, and taken them out to emptiness, and there he had instructed them in modern guidance-methods for ships of s.p.a.ce. So far there was no disagreement. He'd proposed to make them more competent pilots; more capable of driving a ship to Orede, for example, to raid the enormous cattle-herds there. And he'd had them drive the Med Ship to Weald, against which there could be no objection.

But just before arrival he had tricked all four of them by giving them drugged coffee. He'd destroyed the lethal bacterial cultures they'd been ordered to dump on Weald. Then he'd sent the four student pilots off separately--so he and Maril claimed--in huge ships crammed with grain.

But those ships were not to be believed in, anyhow. n.o.body on Dara could imagine stores of food bought up and stored away because it was useless; to keep up prices. n.o.body believed in shiploads of grain to be had for the taking. They did know that the only four partially experienced s.p.a.ce-pilots on Dara had been taken away and by Calhoun's own story sent out of the ship after they'd been drugged. Had they been trained, and had they been helped or even permitted to sow the seeds of plague on Weald, and had they come back prepared to pa.s.s on training to other men to handle other s.p.a.ce-ships now feverishly being built in hidden places on Dara,--why--then Dara might have a chance of survival. But a s.p.a.ce-battle with only partly trained pilots would be hazardous at best.

With no trained pilots at all, it would be hopeless. So Calhoun, by his own story, appeared to have doomed every living being on Dara to ma.s.sacre from the bombs of Weald.

It was this last angle which destroyed any chance of anybody believing in such fairy-tale objects as ships loaded down with grain. Calhoun had shattered Dara's feeble hope of resistance. Weald had some ships and could build or buy others faster than Dara could hope to construct them.

Equally important, Weald had a plenitude of experienced s.p.a.cemen to man some ships fully and train the crews of others. If it had become desperately busy fighting plague, then a fleet to exterminate life on Dara would be delayed. Dara might have gained time at least to build ships which could ram their enemies and destroy them that way.

But Calhoun had made it impossible. If he told the truth and Weald already had a fleet of huge ships which only needed to be emptied of grain and filled with guns and men--why--Dara was doomed. But if he did not tell the truth it was equally doomed by his actions. So Calhoun would be killed.

His execution was to take place in the open s.p.a.ce of the landing-grid, with vision-cameras transmitting the sight over all the blueskin planet.

Half-starved men, with grisly blue blotches on their skins, marched him to the center of the largest level s.p.a.ce on the planet which was not desperately being cultivated. Their hatred showed in their expressions.

Bitterness and fury surrounded Calhoun like a wall. Most of Dara would have liked to see him killed in a manner as atrocious as his crime, but no conceivable death would be satisfying.

So the affair was coldly businesslike, with not even insults offered to him. He was left to stand alone in the very center of the landing-grid floor. There were a hundred blasters which would fire upon him at the same instant. He would not only be killed; he would be destroyed. He would be vaporized by the blue-white flames poured upon him.

His death was remarkably close. Nothing remained but the order to fire, when loudspeakers from the landing-grid office froze everything. One of the grain-ships from Weald had broken out of overdrive and its pilot was triumphantly calling for landing-coordinates. The grid office relayed his call to loudspeaker circuits as the quickest way to get it on the communication system of the whole planet.

"_Calling ground_," boomed the triumphant voice of the first of the student pilots Calhoun had trained. "_Calling ground! Pilot Franz in captured ship requests coordinates for landing! Purpose of landing, to deliver half a million bushels of grain captured from the enemy!_"

At first, n.o.body dared believe it. But the pilot could be seen on vision. He was known. No blueskin would be left alive long enough to be used as a decoy by the men of Weald! Presently the giant ship on its second voyage to Dara--the first had been a generation ago, when it threatened death and destruction--appeared as a dark pinpoint in the sky. It came down and down, and presently it hovered over the center of the tarmac, where Calhoun composedly stood on the spot where he was to have been executed.

The landing-grid crew shifted the ship to one side, and only then did Calhoun stroll in a leisurely fashion toward the Med Ship by the grid's metal-lace wall.

The big ship touched ground, and its exit-port revolved and opened, and the student pilot stood there grinning and heaving out handsful of grain. There was a swarming, yelling, deliriously triumphant crowd, then, where only minutes before there'd been a mob waiting to rejoice when Calhoun's living body exploded into flame.

They no longer hated Calhoun, but he had to fight his way to the Med Ship, nevertheless. He was surrounded by now-ecstatically admiring citizens of Dara, only minutes since they'd thirsted for his blood.

Two hours after the first ship, a second landed. Dara went wild again.

Four hours later still, the third arrived. The fourth came down on the following day.

Then Calhoun faced the executive and cabinet of Dara for the second time. His tone and manner were very dry.

"Now," he said curtly, "I would like a few more astrogators to train. I think it likely that we can raid the Wealdian grain-fleet one time more, and in so doing get the beginning of a fleet for defense. I insist, however, that it must not be used in combat! We might as well be sensible about this situation! After all, four shiploads of grain won't break the famine! They'll help a lot, but they're only the beginning of what's needed for a planetary population!"

"How much grain can we hope for?" demanded a man with a blue mark covering all his chin.

Calhoun told him.

"How long before Weald can have a fleet overhead, dropping fusion bombs?" demanded another, grimly.

Calhoun named a time. But then he said;

"I think we can keep them from dropping bombs if we can get the grain-fleet and some capable astrogators."

"What do you have in mind?"

He told them. It was not possible to tell the whole story of what he considered sensible behavior. An emotional program can be presented and accepted immediately. A plan of action which is actually intelligent, considering all elements of a situation, has to be accepted piecemeal.

Even so, the military men growled.

"We've plenty of heavy elements," said one, with one eye and half his forehead colored blue. "If we'd used our brains, we'd have more bombs than Weald can hope for! We could turn that whole planet into a smoking cinder!"

"Which," said Calhoun acidly, "would give you some satisfaction but not an ounce of food! And food's more important than satisfaction. Now, I'm going to take off for Weald again. I'll want somebody to build an emergency device for my ship, and I'll want the four pilots I've trained and twenty more candidates. And I'd like to have some decent rations!

When the last trip brought back two million bushels of grain, you can spare adequate food for twenty men for a few days!"

It took some time to get the special device constructed, but the Med Ship lifted in two days more. The device for which it had waited was simply a preventive of the disaster overtaking the ship from the mine on Orede. It was essentially a tank of liquid oxygen, packed in the s.p.a.ce from which stores had been taken away. When the ship's air-supply was pumped past it, first moisture and then CO2 froze out. Then the air flowed over the liquefied oxygen at a rate to replace the CO2 with more useful breathing material. Then the moisture was restored to the air as it warmed again. For so long as the oxygen lasted, fresh air for any number of men could be kept purified and breathable. The Med Ship's normal equipment could take care of no more than ten. But with this it could journey to Weald with almost any complement on board.

Maril stayed on Dara when the Med Ship left. Murgatroyd protested shrilly when he discovered her about to be closed out by the closing lock-door.