Life on other planets -- Fiction; Quarantine -- Fiction; Science fiction; Space medicine -- Fiction
There was no answer from the ground when breakout came and Calhoun drove
the Med Ship to a favorable position for a call. He patiently repeated,
over and over again, that Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty notified its arrival
and requested coordinates for landing. There should have been a crisp
description of the direction from the planet's center at which, a
certain time so many hours or minutes later, the force-fields of the
grid would find it convenient to lock onto and lower the Med Ship. But
the communicator remained silent.
"There is a landing-grid," said Calhoun, frowning, "and if they're using
it to load fresh meat for Dara, from the herds I'm told about, it should
be manned. But they don't seem to intend to answer. Maybe they think
that if they pretend I'm not here I'll go away."
He reflected, and his frown deepened.
"If I didn't know what I do know, I might. So if I land on
emergency-rockets the blueskins down below may decide that I come from
Weald. And in that case it would be reasonable to blast me before I
could land and unload some fighting men. On the other hand, no ship from
Weald would conceivably land without impassioned assurance that it was
safe. It would drop bombs." He turned to the girl. "How many Darians
down below?"
She shook her head.
"You don't know," said Calhoun, "or won't tell, yet. But they ought to
be told about the arrival of that ship at Weald, and what Weald thinks
about it! My guess is that you came to tell them. It isn't likely that
Dara gets news direct from Weald. Where were you put ashore from Dara,
when you set out to be a spy?"
Her lips parted to speak. But she compressed them tightly. She shook her
head again.
"It must have been plenty far away," said Calhoun restlessly. "Your
people would have built a ship, and made fine forged papers for it, and
they'd travel so far from this part of space that when they landed
nobody would think of Dara. They'd use makeup to cover the blue spots,
but maybe it was so far away that blueskins had never been heard of!"
Her face looked pinched, but she did not reply.
"Then they'd land half a dozen of you, with a supply of makeup for the
blue patches. And you'd separate, and take ships that went various
roundabout ways, and arrive on Weald one by one, to see what could be
done there to...." He stopped. "When did you find out positively that
there wasn't any plague any more?"
She began to grow pale.
"I'm not a mind-reader," said Calhoun. "But it adds up. You're from
Dara. You've been on Weald. It's practically certain that there are
other, agents, if you like that word better, on Weald. And there hasn't
been a plague on Weald so you people aren't carriers of it. But you
knew it in advance, I think. How'd you learn? Did a ship in some sort of
trouble land there, on Dara?"
"Y-yes," said the girl. "We wouldn't let it go again. But the people
didn't catch--they didn't die--they lived--."
She stopped short.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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