Murray Leinster - Med Ship

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Med Ship

by Murray Leinster

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this

book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is

purely coincidental.

"Med Ship Man" was first published in Galaxy, October 1963, and was

later reissued in Doctor to the Stars (Pyramid 1964). "Plague on Kryder

II" was first published in Analog, December 1964, and was later reissued

in S.O.S. From Three Worlds (Ace 1967). "The Mutant Weapon" was first

published under the title "Med Service" in Astounding, August 1957. It

was reissued as a novel under the current title by Ace in 1959. "Ribbon in

the Sky" was first published in Astounding, October 1957, and was later

reissued as part of S.O.S. From Three Worlds. "Tallien Three" was first

published under the title "The Hate Disease" in Analog, August 1963, and

was later reissued as part of Doctor to the Stars. "Quarantine World" was

first published in Analog, November 1966, and was later reissued as part

of S.O.S. From Three Worlds. "The Grandfathers' War" was first

published in Astounding, October 1957, and was later reissued as part of

Doctor to the Stars. "Pariah Planet" was first published in Amazing, July

1961, and was reissued as a novel by Ace under the title This World is

Taboo.

thereof in any form.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

www.baen.com

ISBN: 0-7434-3555-9

Cover art by Bob Eggleton

First printing, August 2002

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Production by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH

Printed in the United States of America

EMERGENCY SURGERY

The nearest-object indicator showed something moving toward the Med Ship. There

was a small object headed toward the planet from empty space. Calhoun put on double

acceleration to intercept it.

The spacephone growled: "Med Ship! What do you think you're doing?"

"Getting in trouble," said Calhoun briefly.

"Med Ship!" the voice rasped. "Keep out of the way of our missile! It's a megaton

bomb!"

Calhoun said irrelevantly: "Those who in quarrels interpose, must often wipe a

bloody nose." He added, "I know what it is."

Calhoun aimed his ship. He knew the capacities of his ship as only a man who'd

handled one for a long time could. He knew quite exactly what it could do.

The rocket from remoteness—the megaton-bomb missile—came smoking furiously

from the stars. Calhoun seemed to throw his ship into a collision course.

The rocket swerved to avoid him, though guided from many thousands of miles away.

There was a trivial time-lag between the time its scanners picked up a picture and

transmitted it, and the controlling impulse reached the missile in response. Calhoun

counted on that. But he wasn't trying for a collision. He was forcing evasive action.

He secured it. The rocket slanted itself to dart aside. Calhoun threw the Med Ship into

a flip-flop and slashed the missile with his own ship's rocket flame. . . .

MED SHIP MAN

Calhoun regarded the communicator with something like exasperation as his taped

voice repeated a standard approach-call for the twentieth time. But no answer came,

which had become irritating a long time ago. This was a new Med Service sector for

Calhoun. He'd been assigned to another man's tour of duty because the other man had

been taken down with romance. He'd gotten married, which ruled him out for Med Ship

duty. So now Calhoun listened to his own voice endlessly repeating a call that should

have been answered immediately.

Murgatroyd the tormal watched with beady, interested eyes. The planet Maya lay off

to port of the Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty. Its almost-circular disk showed full-size on a

vision-screen beside the ship's control-board. There was an ice-cap in view. There were

continents. There were seas. The cloud-system of a considerable cyclonic disturbance

could be noted off at one side, and the continents looked reasonably as they should, and

the seas were of that muddy, indescribable tint which indicates deep water.

Calhoun's own voice, taped half an hour earlier, sounded in a speaker as it went again

to the communicator and then to the extremely visible world a hundred thousand miles

away.

"Calling ground," said Calhoun's recorded voice. "Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty

calling ground to report arrival and ask coordinates for landing. Our mass is fifty

standard tons. Repeat, five-oh tons. Purpose of landing, planetary health inspection."

The recorded voice stopped. There was silence except for those also-taped random

noises which kept the inside of the ship from feeling like the inside of a tomb.

Murgatroyd said:

"Chee?"

Calhoun said ironically:

"Undoubtedly, Murgatroyd! Undoubtedly! Whoever's on duty at the spaceport

stepped out for a moment, or dropped dead, or did something equally inconvenient. We

have to wait until he gets back or somebody else takes over!"

Murgatroyd said "Chee!" again and began to lick his whiskers. He knew that when

Calhoun called on the communicator, another human voice should reply. Then there

should be conversation, and shortly the force-fields of a landing-grid should take hold of

the Med Ship and draw it planetward. In time it ought to touch ground in a space-port

with a gigantic, silvery landing-grid rising skyward all about it. Then there should be

people greeting Calhoun cordially and welcoming Murgatroyd with smiles and pettings.

"Calling ground," said the recorded voice yet again. "Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty—"

It went on through the formal notice of arrival. Murgatroyd waited in pleasurable

anticipation. When the Med Ship arrived at a port of call humans gave him sweets and

cakes, and they thought it charming that he drank coffee just like a human, only with

more gusto. Aground, Murgatroyd moved zestfully in society while Calhoun worked.

Calhoun's work was conferences with planetary health officials, politely receiving such

information as they thought important, and tactfully telling them about the most recent

developments in medical science as known to the Interstellar Medical Service.

"Somebody," said Calhoun darkly, "is going to catch the devil for this!"

The communicator loud-speaker spoke abruptly.

"Calling Med Ship," said a voice. "Calling Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty! Liner

Candida calling. Have you had an answer from ground?"

"Not yet. I've been calling all of half an hour, too!"

"We've been in orbit twelve hours," said the voice from emptiness. "Calling all the

while. No answer. We don't like it."

Calhoun flipped a switch that threw a vision-screen into circuit with the ship's

electron telescope. A star-field appeared and shifted wildly. Then a bright dot centered

itself. He raised the magnification. The bright dot swelled and became a chubby

commercial ship, with the false ports that passengers like to believe they look through

when in space. Two relatively large cargo-ports on each side showed that it carried heavy

freight in addition to passengers. It was one of those work-horse intra-cluster ships that

distribute the freight and passengers the long-haul liners dump off only at established

transshipping ports.

Murgatroyd padded across the Med Ship's cabin and examined the image with a fine

air of wisdom. It did not mean anything to him, but he said, "Chee!" as if making an

observation of profound significance. He went back to the cushion on which he'd been

curled up.

"We don't see anything wrong aground," the liner's voice complained, "but they don't

answer calls! We don't get any scatter-signals either. We went down to two diameters and

couldn't pick up a thing. And we have a passenger to land! He insists on it!"

Ordinarily, communications between different places on a planet's surface use

frequencies the ion-layers of the atmosphere either reflect or refract down past the

horizon. But there is usually some small leakage to space, and line-of-sight frequencies

are generally abundant. It is one of the annoyances of a ship coming in to port that space

near most planets is usually full of local signals.

"I'll check," said Calhoun curtly. "Stand by."

The Candida would have arrived off Maya as the Med Ship had done, and called

down as Calhoun had been doing. It was very probably a ship on schedule and the grid

operator at the space-port should have expected it. Space-commerce was important to any

planet, comparing more or less with the export-import business of an industrial nation in

ancient times on Earth. Planets had elaborate traffic-aid systems for the cargo-carriers

which moved between solar systems as they'd once moved between continents on Earth.

Such traffic aids were very carefully maintained. Certainly for a space-port landing-grid

not to respond to calls for twelve hours running seemed ominous.

"We've been wondering," said the Candida querulously, "if there could be something

radically wrong below. Sickness, for example."

The word "sickness" was a substitute for a more alarming word. But a plague had

nearly wiped out the population of Dorset, once upon a time, and the first ships to arrive

after it had broken out most incautiously went down to ground, and so carried the plague

to their next two ports of call. Nowadays quarantine regulations were enforced very

strictly indeed.

"I'll try to find out what's the matter," said Calhoun.

"We've got a passenger," repeated the Candida aggrievedly, "who insists that we land

him by space-boat if we don't make a ship-landing. He says he has important business

aground."

Calhoun did not answer. The rights of passengers were extravagantly protected, these

days. To fail to deliver a passenger to his destination entitled him to punitive damages

which no space-line could afford. So the Med Ship would seem heaven-sent to the

Candida's skipper. Calhoun could relieve him of responsibility.

The telescope screen winked, and showed the surface of the planet a hundred

thousand miles away. Calhoun glanced at the image on the port screen and guided the

telescope to the space-port city—Maya City. He saw highways and blocks of buildings.

He saw the space-port and its landing-grid. He could see no motion, of course. He raised

the magnification. He raised it again. Still no motion. He upped the magnification until

the lattice-pattern of the telescope's amplifying crystal began to show. But at the ship's

distance from the planet, a ground-car would represent only the fortieth of a second of

arc. There was atmosphere, too, with thermals. Anything the size of a ground-car simply

couldn't be seen.

But the city showed quite clearly. Nothing massive had happened to it. No large-scale

physical disaster had occurred. It simply did not answer calls from space.

Calhoun flipped off the screen.

"I think," he said irritably into the communicator microphone, "I suspect I'll have to

make an emergency landing. It could be something as trivial as a power failure"—but he

knew that was wildly improbable—"or it could be—anything. I'll land on rockets and tell

you what I find."

The voice from the Candida said hopefully:

"Can you authorize us to refuse to land our passenger for his own protection? He's

raising the devil! He insists that his business demands that he be landed."

A word from Calhoun as a Med Service man would protect the space-liner from a

claim for damages. But Calhoun didn't like the look of things. He realized, distastefully,

that he might find practically anything down below. He might find that he had to

quarantine the planet and himself with it. In such a case he'd need the Candida to carry

word of the quarantine to other planets and get word to Med Service sector headquarters.

"We've lost a lot of time," insisted the Candida. "Can you authorize us—"

"Not yet," said Calhoun. "I'll tell you when I land."

"But—"

"I'm signing off for the moment," said Calhoun. "Stand by."

He headed the little ship downward and as it gathered velocity he went over the

briefing-sheets covering this particular world. He'd never touched ground here before.

His occupation, of course, was seeing to the dissemination of medical science as it

developed under the Med Service. The Service itself was neither political nor

administrative, but it was important. Every human-occupied world was supposed to have

a Med Ship visit at least once in four years. Such visits verified the state of public health.

Med Ship men like Calhoun offered advice on public-health problems. When something

out of the ordinary turned up, the Med Service had a staff of researchers who hadn't been

wholly baffled yet. There were great ships which could carry the ultimate in laboratory

equipment and specialized personnel to any place where they were needed. Not less than

a dozen inhabited worlds in this sector alone owed the survival of their populations to the

Med Service, and the number of those which couldn't have been colonized without Med

Service help was legion.

Calhoun re-read the briefing. Maya was one of four planets in this general area whose

life-systems seemed to have had a common origin, suggesting that the Arrhenius theory

of space-traveling spores was true in some limited sense. A genus of ground-cover plants

with motile stems and leaves, and cannibalistic tendencies, was considered strong

evidence of common origin.

The planet had been colonized for two centuries, now, and produced organic

compounds of great value from indigenous plants. They were used in textile manufacture.

There were no local endemic infections to which men were susceptible. A number of

human-use crops were grown. Cereals, grasses and grains, however, could not be grown

because of the native ground-cover motile-stem plants. All wheat and cereal food had to

be imported, and the fact severely limited Maya's population. There were about two

million on the planet, settled on a peninsula in the Yucatan Sea and a small area of

mainland. Public-health surveys had shown such-and-such, and such-and-such, and thus-

and-so. There was no mention of anything to account for the failure of the space-port to

respond to arrival-calls from space. Naturally!

The Med Ship drove on down. The planet revolved beneath it. As Maya's sunlit

hemisphere enlarged, Calhoun kept the telescope's field wide. He saw cities and vast

areas of cleared land where native plants were grown as raw materials for the organics'

manufacturies. He saw little true chlorophyll green, though. Mayan foliage tended to a

dark, olive-green.

At fifty miles he was sure that the city streets were empty even of ground-car traffic.

There was no spaceship aground in the landing-grid. There were no ground-cars in

motion on the splendid, multiple-lane highways.

At thirty miles altitude there were still no signals in the atmosphere, though when he

tried amplitude-modulation reception he picked up static. But there was no normally

modulated signal on the air at any frequency. At twenty miles, no. At fifteen miles

broadcast power was available, which proved that the landing-grid was working as usual,

tapping the upper atmosphere for electric charges to furnish power for all the planet's

needs.

From ten miles down to ground-touch, Calhoun was busy. It is not too difficult to

land a ship on rockets, with reasonably level ground to land on. But landing at a specific

spot is something else. Calhoun juggled the ship to descend inside the grid aground. His

rockets burned out pencil-thin holes through the clay and stone beneath the tarmac. He

cut them off.

Silence. Stillness. The Med Ship's outside microphones picked up small noises of

wind blowing over the city. There was no other sound at all.

—No. There was a singularly deliberate clicking sound, not loud and not fast. Perhaps

a click—a double-click—every two seconds. That was all.

Calhoun went into the airlock with Murgatroyd frisking a little in the expectation of

great social success among the people of this world. Calhoun cracked the outer airlock

door. He smelled something. It was a faintly sour, astringent odor that had the quality of

decay in it. But it was no kind of decay he recognized. Again stillness and silence. No

traffic-noise. Not even the almost inaudible murmur that every city has in all its ways at

all hours. The buildings looked as buildings should look at daybreak, except that the

doors and windows were open. It was somehow shocking.

A ruined city is dramatic. An abandoned city is pathetic. This was neither. It was

something new. It felt as if everybody had walked away, out of sight, within the past few

minutes.

Calhoun headed for the space-port building with Murgatroyd ambling puzzledly at his

side. Murgatroyd was disturbed. There should be people here! They should welcome

Calhoun and admire him—Murgatroyd—and he should be a social lion with all the

sweets he could eat and all the coffee he could put into his expandable belly. But nothing

happened. Nothing at all.

"Chee?" he asked anxiously. "Chee-chee?"

"They've gone away," growled Calhoun. "They probably left in ground-cars. There's

not a one in sight."

There wasn't. Calhoun could look out through the grid foundations and see long,

sunlit, and absolutely empty streets. He arrived at the space-port building. There was—

there had been—a green space about the base of the structure. There was not a living

plant left. Leaves were wilted and limp. There was almost a jelly of collapsed stems and

blossoms, of dark olive-green. The plants were dead, but not long enough to have dried

up. They might have wilted two days before. Possibly three.

Calhoun went in the building. The space-port log lay open on a desk. It recorded the

arrival of freight to be shipped away—undoubtedly—on the Candida now uneasily in

orbit somewhere aloft. There was no sign of disorder. It was exactly as if the people here

had walked out to look at something interesting, and hadn't come back.

Calhoun trudged out of the space-port and to the streets and buildings of the city

proper. It was incredible! Doors were opened or unlocked. Merchandise in the shops lay

on display, exactly as it had been spread out to interest customers. There was no sign of

confusion anywhere. Even in a restaurant there were dishes and flatware on the tables.

The food in the plates was stale, as if three days old, but it hadn't yet begun to spoil. The

appearance of everything was as if people at their meals had simply, at some signal,

gotten up and walked out without any panic or disturbance.

Calhoun made a wry face. He'd remembered something. Among the tales that had

been carried from Earth to the other worlds of the galaxy there was a completely

unimportant mystery-story which people still sometimes tried to write an ending to. It

was the story of an ancient sailing-ship called the Marie Celeste, which was found sailing

aimlessly in the middle of the ocean. There was food on the cabin table and the galley

stove was still warm, and there was no sign of any trouble, or terror, or disturbance which

might cause the ship to be abandoned. But there was not a living soul on board. Nobody

had ever been able to contrive a believable explanation.

"Only," said Calhoun to Murgatroyd, "this is on a larger scale. The people of this city

walked out about three days ago, and didn't come back. Maybe all the people on the

planet did the same, since there's not a communicator in operation anywhere. To make

the understatement of the century, Murgatroyd, I don't like this! I don't like it a bit!"

On the way back to the Med Ship, Calhoun stopped at another place where, on a

grass-growing planet, there would have been green sward. There were Earth-type trees,

and some native ones, and between them there should have been a lawn. The trees were

thriving, but the ground-cover plants were collapsed and rotting. Calhoun picked up a bit

of the semi-slime and smelled it. It had a faintly sour and astringent smell, the same he'd

noticed when he opened the airlock door. He threw the stuff away and brushed off his

hands. Something had killed the ground-cover plants which had the habit of killing Earth-

type grass when planted here.

He listened. Everywhere that humans live, there are insects and birds and other tiny

creatures which are essential parts of the ecological system to which the human race is

adjusted. They have to be carried to and established upon every new world that mankind

hopes to occupy. But there was no sound of such living creatures here. It was probable

that the bellowing roar of the Med Ship's emergency rockets was the only real noise the

city had heard since its people went away.

The stillness bothered Murgatroyd. He said, "Chee!" in a subdued tone and stayed

close to Calhoun. Calhoun shook his head. Then he said abruptly:

"Come along, Murgatroyd!"

He went back to the grid and the building housing its controls. He didn't look at the

space-port log this time. He went to the instruments recording the second function of a

landing-grid. In addition to lifting up and letting down ships of space, a landing-grid drew

down power from the ions of the upper atmosphere, and broadcast it. It provided all the

energy that humans on a world could need. It was solar power, in a way, absorbed and

stored by a layer of ions miles high, which then could be drawn on and distributed by the

grid. During his descent Calhoun had noted that broadcast power was still available. Now

he looked at what the instruments said.

The needle on the dial showing power-drain moved slowly back and forth. It was a

rhythmic movement, going from maximum to minimum power-use, and then back again.

Approximately six million kilowatts was being taken out of the broadcast every two

seconds for half of one second. Then the drain cut off for a second and a half, and went

on again—for half a second.

Frowning, Calhoun raised his eyes to a very fine color photograph on the wall above

the power dials. It was a picture of the human-occupied part of Maya, taken four

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摘要：

MedShipbyMurrayLeinsterThisisaworkoffiction.Allthecharactersandeventsportrayedinthisbookarefictional,andanyresemblancetorealpeopleorincidentsispurelycoincidental."MedShipMan"wasfirstpublishedinGalaxy,October1963,andwaslaterreissuedinDoctortotheStars(Pyramid1964)."PlagueonKryderII"wasfirstpublishedi...

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