Life on other planets -- Fiction; Medical fiction; Physicians -- Fiction; Science fiction; Space medicine -- Fiction
Presently he was confident that the cattle field was past. He sent his
car up to eighty miles an hour. The other cars followed faithfully. To
a hundred. They did not drop behind. The car hummed through the night
at top speed--a hundred and twenty, a hundred and thirty miles an hour.
The three other cars' headlights faithfully kept pace with him.
Allison, said desperately, "Look! I--don't understand what's happened.
You talk as if I'd planned all this. I--did have advance notice of a--a
research project here. But it shouldn't have held the people there for
days! Something went wrong! I only believed that people would want to
leave Maya. I'd only planned to buy as much acreage as I could, and
control of as many factories as possible. That's all! It was business!
Only business!"
Calhoun did not answer. Allison might be telling the truth. Some
businessmen would think it only intelligent to frighten people into
selling their holdings below true value. Something of the sort happened
every day in stock exchanges. But the people of Maya could have died!
For that matter, they still might. They couldn't return to their homes
and food so long as broadcast power kept the cattle-fence in existence.
But they could not return to their homes and food supplies if the power
broadcast was cut off, either.
Over all the night surface of the world of Maya there was light only
on one highway at one spot, and a multitude of smaller, lesser lights
where the people of Maya waited to find out whether they would live or
die.
V
Calhoun considered coldly. They were beyond what had been the
farthest small city on the multiple highway. They would go on past
now-starlit fields of plants native to Maya, passing many places where
trucks loaded with the plants climbed up to the roadway and headed
for the factories which made use of them. The fields ran for scores
of miles along the highway's length. They reached out beyond the
horizon,--perhaps scores of miles in that direction, too. There were
thousands upon thousands of square miles devoted to the growing of the
dark-green vegetation which supplied the raw materials for Maya's space
exports. Some hundred-odd miles ahead, the small town of Tenochitlan
lay huddled in the light of the distant star-cluster. Beyond that, more
highway and Maya City. Beyond that--
Calhoun reasoned that the projector to make the induction cattle fence
would be beyond Maya City, somewhere in the mountains the photograph
in the spaceport building showed. A large highway went into those
mountains for a limited distance only.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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