Life on other planets -- Fiction; Medical fiction; Physicians -- Fiction; Science fiction; Space medicine -- Fiction
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 spaceliner
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 thus 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 to verify 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 reread 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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