Life on other planets -- Fiction; Quarantine -- Fiction; Science fiction; Space medicine -- Fiction
"It's not fair to trap me!" she cried passionately, "It's not fair!"
"I'll stop," said Calhoun.
He turned to the control-board. The Med Ship was only planetary
diameters from Orede, now, and the electron telescope showed shining
stars in leisurely motion across its screen. Then a huge, gibbous
shining shape appeared, and there were irregular patches of that muddy
color which is sea-bottom, and varicolored areas which were plains and
forests. Also there were mountains. Calhoun steadied the image and
squinted at it.
"The mine," he observed, "was found by members of a hunting-party,
killing wild cattle for sport."
* * * * *
Even a small planet has many millions of square miles of surface, and a
single human installation on a whole world will not be easy to find by
random search. But there were clues to this one. Men hunting for sport
would not choose a tropic nor an arctic climate to hunt in. So if they
found a mineral deposit, it would have been in a temperate zone. Cattle
would not be found deep in a mountainous terrain. The mine would not be
on a prairie. The settlement on Orede, then, would be near the edge of
mountains, not far from a prairie such as wild cattle would frequent,
and it would be in a temperate climate. Forested areas could be ruled
out. And there would be a landing-grid. Handling only one ship at a
time, it might be a very small grid. It need be only hundreds of yards
across and less than half a mile high. But its shadow would be
distinctive.
Calhoun searched among low mountains near unforested prairie in a
temperate zone. He found a speck. He enlarged it many-fold, and it was
the mine on Orede. There were heaps of tailings. There was something
which cast a long, lacy shadow. The landing-grid.
"But they don't answer our call," observed Calhoun, "so we go down
unwelcomed."
He inverted the Med Ship and the emergency-rockets boomed. The ship
plunged planetward.
A long time later it was deep in the planet's atmosphere. The noise of
its rockets had become thunderous, with air to carry and to reinforce
the sound.
"Hold on to something, Murgatroyd," commanded Calhoun. "We may have to
dodge some ack."
But nothing came up from below. The Med Ship again inverted itself, and
its rockets pointed toward the planet and poured out pencil-thin,
blue-white, high-velocity flames. It checked slightly, but continued to
descend. It was not directly above the grid. It swept downward until
almost level with the peaks of the mountains in which the mine lay. It
tilted again, and swept onward over the mountain-tops, and then tilted
once more and went racing up the valley in which the landing-grid was
plainly visible. Calhoun swung it on an erratic course, lest there be
opposition.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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