Murray Leinster - The Mutant Weapon

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CHAPTER I

"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 iti 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 called the

intelligent use of probability, or ethics, or piety, makes no difference in the facts. 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 ..."

Probability and Human Conduct--Fitzgerald

CALHOUN lay in his bunk and read Fitzgerald on Probability jtmd Human Conduct as the little Med

Ship floated in overdrive. In overdrive travel there is nothing to do but pass the time away.

Murgatroyd, the tormal, slept curled up in a ball in one corner of the small ship's cabin. His

tail was meticulously curled about his nose. The ship's lights burned steadily. There were those

small random noises which have to be provided to keep a man sane in the dead stillness of a ship

traveling at very many times the speed of light. Calhoun turned a page and yawned.

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

"When the tone sounds, breakout will be five seconds off."

A metronomic clicking, 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.

"Bong!" said the tape. It counted down. "Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . one . . ."

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." "Chee!" shrilled Murgatroyd.

He uncoiled his tail from about a cabinet handle and hopped up to look at the vision screen. What

he saw, of course, meant nothing to him. But all tormals imitate the actions of human beings, as

parrots imitate their speech. He blinked wisely at the screen and turned his eyes to Calhoun.

"It's Maris HI," Calhoun told him, "and pretty close. It's a colony of Dettra Two. One city

was reported started two Earth-years ago. It should just about be colonized now." "Chee-chee!"

shrilled Murgatroyd.

"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.

"Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty to ground," he said into the transmitter. "Requesting co-ordinates for

landing. Our mass

is fifty tons. Repeat, five-oh tons. Purpose of landing: planetary health inspection."

He relaxed. This job ought to be purest routine. There was a landing grid in the spaceport city on

Maris III. From its control room instructions should be sent, indicating a position some five

planetary diameters from the surface of that world. Calhoun's little ship should repair to that

spot. The giant landing grid should then reach out its specialized force field, lock onto the

ship, and bring it gently but irresistibly down to ground. Then Calhoun, representing Med Service,

should confer gravely with planetary authorities about public health conditions on Maris III.

It was not to be expected that anything important would turn up. Calhoun would deliver full

details of" recent advances in the science of medicine. These might already have reached Maris III

in the ordinary course of commerce, but he would make sure. He might-but it was unlikely-learn of

some novelty worked out here. In any case, within three days he should return to the small Med

Ship, the landing grid should heave it firmly heavenward to not less than five planetary diameters

distance, and there release it. And Calhoun and Murgatroyd and the Med Ship should flick into

overdrive and speed back toward headquarters, from whence they had come.

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

nearby planet.

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"By the map," he observed to Murgatroyd, "the city ought to be on shore of that bay somewhere near

the terminus. Close to the sunset line."

His call was answered. A voice said incredulously on the spacephone speaker:

"What? What's that? What's that you say?"

"Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty," Calhoun repeated patiently. "Requesting co-ordinates for landing. Our

mass is fifty tons. Repeat, five-oh tons. Purpose of landing: planetary health inspection."

The voice said more incredulously still:

"A Med Ship? Holy-" By the change of sound, the man

down on the planet had turned away from the microphone. "Hey! Listen to this!"

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 spacephone, up from the

ground:

"You up there! Identify yourself!"

Calhoun said very politely:

"This is Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty. I would like to come to ground. Purpose of landing: health

inspection."

'Wait," said the voice from the planet. It sounded strained.

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 afl! The Med Service was badly overworked arid understaffed. The resources of

interplanetary services were always apt to be stretched to their utmost, because there could be no

galactic government as such. Many thousands of occupied planets, the closest of them light-years

apart, 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 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 worthwhile. 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 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 arid monstrous noise. The Lights flashed up and circuit breakers cut them off. The nearest-

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. There was dead silence, and Murgatroyd made whimpering sounds in

the darkness.

Calhoun thought absurdly to himself, According to the book, this is an unfavorable chance

consequence of something or other. But it was more than an unfavorable chance occurrence. It was

an intentional and drastic and possibly a deadly one.

"Somebody's acting up," said Calhoun measuredly, in the blackness. "What the hell'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 overload 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 asjhis eyes adjusted, he saw the pale 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 could only be 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 cutoff. It could not be

accidental. The reception of the news of his identity, the repeated request that he identify

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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-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 insulated 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 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, and 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 fastened the safety belt before a furious jolt nearly flung him

out of it again to crash against the cabin ceiling. Still another vicious surge of acceleration,

and he scrabbled for the controls. The yanking and plunging of the ship increased intolerably. He

was nauseated. Once he was thrust so furiously into the control chair that the 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, he tried, despite their bruising, 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 to be 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 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 thunderclap.

But abruptly there was a strange and incredible peace. The lights came on waveringly as his

shaking fingers restored the circuit breakers. Murgatroyd shrilled indignantly, clinging

desperately to an instrument rack. But the vision screens did not light again. Calhoun swore.

Swiftly, he threw more circuit restorers. The nearest-object indicator told of the presence of

Maris III at forty-odd thousand miles. The hull-temperature indicator was up some fifty-six

degrees. The internal-gravity field came on faintly, and then built up to normal. But the screens

would not light. They were per-

manently dead. Calhoun raged for seconds. Then he got hold of himself.

"Chee-chee-cheel" chattered Murgatroyd desperately. "Chee-chee!"

"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

spaceliners 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'11 twist his tail too, either for trying what he did or for not getting away

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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.

"Chee-chee!" cried Murgatroyd hysterically.

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-"

The planet Marris III swung across the electron telescope's field. It looked hideously near, but

that was the telescope's magnification. Yet Calhoun sweated. He looked at the nearest-object dial

for reassurance. The planet was nearer by a thousand miles.

"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 could 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.

He went down. At four hundred miles the outside-pressure indicator wavered away from its pin. He

used it like a Pilot-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 its 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.

At two miles he used the rockets for deceleration. The pencil-thin flame reached down for an

incredible distance. By naked-eye observation out a port, he tilted the fiercely roaring, swiftly

falling ship until hillsides and forests underneath him ceased to move. By that time he was very

low indeed.

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 treetops 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 runnel among monstrous trees. The slender, high-velocity flame did not splash when it

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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 only 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,

which were 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 noise, they suggested the sort of concert of night-creatures which to men has

always seemed an indication of purest tran-quility.

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 forty thousand miles in space.

It was the city which had made Calhoun land with his vision plates blinded; which 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 overpasses 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?"

"Cheel" shrilled Murgatroyd.

CHAPTER II

"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 of duration. For

an individual the temptingness of different degrees of in-tensity-of experience is readily

computed. However, the tempting-ness of different durations is equally necessary for an estimate

of the probability of a given person performing a given action. This modification of desirability

by expected duration depends on the individual's time sense; its acuity and its accuracy.

Measurements of time sense ..."

Probability and Human Conduct--Fitzgerald

EVENTUALLY Calhoun left the ship and found a cultivated field and a dead man and other things. But

while in the Med Ship he found only bewilderment. The first morning he carefujly monitored the

entire communications spectrum. There were no man-made signals in the air of Maris III. That was

proof the world was uninhabited. But the ship's external microphones picked up a rocket roar in

mid-morning. Calhoun looked, and saw the faint white trail of the rocket

against the blue of the sky. The fact that he saw it was proof that it was in atmosphere. And that

was evidence that the rocket was taking photographs for signs of the crater the Med Ship should

have made in a crash landing.

The fact of search was proof that the planet was inhabited, but 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 thev'd answered CaDioun's hail, and tried to kill him when he identified

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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 be such a situation.

There was no logical explanation for such a series of contradictions. Civilized men acted either

this way or that. There could only be civilized men here, yet they acted neither this way nor

that. Therefore-and 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.

Travel on foot was unaccustomed, but not difficult. The Vegetation was semi-familiar. Maris III

was an Earth-type planet and circled a Sol-type sun, and given similar conditions of gravity, air,

sunlight, and temperature range, similar organisms should develop. There would be room, for

example, for low-growing ground-cover plants, and there would also be advantages to height. There

would be some equivalent of grass, and there would be the equivalent of trees, with intermediate

forms having in-between habits of growth. Similar reasoning would apply to animal We. There w6uld

be parallel ecological niches for animals to fill, and animals would adapt to fill them.

Maris III was not, then, an "unearthly" environment. It was much more like an unfamiliar part of a

known planet than a new world altogether. But there were some oddities. An herbivorous creature

without legs which squirmed like a snake. A pigeon-sized creature whose wings were modified,

gossamer-thin scales with iridescent colorings. There were creatures which seemed to live in

lunatic association, and Calhoun was irritably curious to know if they were really symbiotes or

only unrecognizable forms of the same organism, like the terrestrial male and female firefly-

glowworm.

But he was heading for the city. He couldn't spare time to biologize. On his first day's journey

he looked for food to save the rations he carried. Murgatroyd was handy here. The little formal

had his place in human society. He was ,friendly, and he was passionately imitative of human

beings, and he had a definite psychology of his own. But he was useful, too. When Calhoun strode

through the forests, which had such curiously unleaflike foliage, Murgatroyd strode grandly with

him, imitating his walk. From time to time he dropped to all four paws to investigate something.

He invariably caught up with Calhoun within seconds.

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.

When Calhoun camped the first night, he made a fire of a plant shaped like a cactus barrel and

permeated with oil. By heaping dirt around it, he confined its burning to a round space very

much.like the direct-heat element of an electronic stove. It was an odd illustration of the fact

that human progress does not involve anything really new in kind, but only increased convenience

and availability of highly primitive comforts. By the light of that circular bonfire. Calhoun

actually read a little. But the light was inadequate. Presently he yawned. One did not get very

far in the Med Service without knowing probability in human conduct. It enabled one to check on

the accuracy of statements made, whether by patients or officials, to a Med Ship man. Today,

though, he'd traveled a long way on foot. He glanced at Murgatroyd, who was gravely pretending to

read from a singularly straight-edged leaf.

'Murgatroyd," said Calhoun, "it is likely that you will interpret any strange sound as a possible

undersirable 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."

Murgatroyd said "Chee," and Calhoun rolled over and went to sleep.

It was mid-morning of the next day when he came upon a cultivated field. It had been cleared and

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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.

As a corpse, the man was brand new, and Calhoun very carefully put himself into a strictly medical

frame of mind before he bent over for a technical estimate of what had happened, and when. The

dead man seemed to have died of hunger. He was terribly emaciated, and he didn't belong in a

cultivated field far from the city. By his garments he was a city dweller and a prosperous one. He

wore the jewels

which nowadays indicated a man's profession and status in it much more than the value of his

possessions. There was money in his pockets, and writing materials, a wallet with pictures and

identification, and the normal oddments a man would carry. He'd been a civil servant of the city.

And he shouldn't have died of starvation.

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.

The little formal took it in his paws and on the instant was eating it with gusto.

"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.

"In all history," said Calhoun, "nobody's ever been able to poison one of you tormals because of

your digestive system has a qualitative analysis unit in it that yells bloody murder if anything's

likely to disagree with you. As a probability of tormal reaction, you'd have been nauseated before

now if that stuff wasn't good'to eat."

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:

"Cheer

"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."

He verified the format's pulse and respiration and temperature. He put a tiny breath sample

through the part of the lab kit which read off a basic metabolism rate. The small animal was quite

accustomed to the process. He submitted blandly. The result of the checkover was that Murgatroyd

the tormal was perfectly normal.

"But," said Calhoun angrily, "that man died of starvation! There was practically no fat in the

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?"

Murgatroyd wriggled unhappily, because Calhoun's tone was accusing. He said, "Chee!" in a subdued

tone of voice. He looked pleadingly up at Calhoun.

"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

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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?"

"Cheel" said Murgatroyd with conviction.

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 damned long way from the city. What was he

doing out here, anyhow?"

He hesitated and tramped on again. A city man found starved in a remote place might have become

lost, somehow or other. But if this man was lost, he was assuredly not without food. '

"He belonged in the city," said Calhoun vexedly, "and he left it. The city's almost but not quite

empty. Our would-be murderers are in it. This is a new colony. There was a city to be built and

fields to be plowed and planted, and then a population was to come here from Dettra Two. The

city's built and the fields are plowed and planted. Where's the population?"

•He scowled thoughtfully at the ground before him. Murgatroyd tried to scowl too, but he wasn't

very successful.

"What's the answer, Murgatroyd? Did the man come away from the city because he had a disease? Was

he driven out?"

"Chee," said Murgatroyd without conviction.

"I don't know either," admitted Calhoun. "He walked out into the middle of that field and then

stopped walking. He was hungry and he ate. He digested. He stayed there for days. Why? Was he

waiting to die of something? -Presently

he stopped eating. He died. What made him leave the city? What made him stop ^eating? Why did he

die?"

Murgatroyd investigated a small plant and decided that it was not interesting. He came back to

Calhoun.

"He wasn't killed," said Calhoun, "but somebody tried to kill us-somebody who's in the city now.

That man could have come out here to keep from being killed by the same people. Yet he died

anyhow. Why'd they want to kill him? Why'd they want to kill us? Because we were a. Med Ship?

Because they didn't want Med Service to know there was a disease here? Ridiculous!"

"Chee," said Murgatroyd.

"I don't like the looks of things," said Calhoun. "For instance, in any ecological system there

are always carrion eaters. At least some of them fly. There would be plain signs if the city was

full of corpses. There aren't anv. On the other hand, if the city was inhabited, and there was

sickness, they would welcome a Med Ship with open arms. But that dead man didn't come away from

the city in any ordinary course of events, and he didn't die in any conventional fashion. There's

an empty city and an improbable dead man and a still more improbable attempt at murder! What

gives, Murgatroyd?"

Murgatroyd took hold of Calhoun's hand and tugged at it. He was bored. Calhoun moved on slowly.

"Paradoxes don't turn up in nature," said Calhoun darkly. "Things that happen naturally never

contradict each other. You only get such things when men try to do things that don't fit together-

like having a plague and trying to destroy a Med Ship, if that's the case, and living in a city

and not showing on its streets, if that is occurring, and dying of starvation while one's

digestion is good and there's food within hand's reach. And that did happen! There was dirty work

at the spaceport, Murgatroyd. I suspect dirty work at every crossroad. Keep your eyes open."

"Chee," said Murgatroyd. Calhoun was fully in motion, now, and Murgatroyd let go of his hand and

went on ahead to look things over.

Calhoun crossed the top of a rounded hillcrest 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 of his death. But that didn't make, it

plausible. He saw another ridge of hills ahead. x

In another hour he came to the crest of that farther range. It was the worn-down remnant of a very

ancient mountain chain, 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.

That was the city of Maris III, which had been built to receive colonists from Dettra and relieve

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