Life on other planets -- Fiction; Quarantine -- Fiction; Science fiction; Space medicine -- Fiction
"Obviously," said Calhoun, "you'll put it as far as possible from the
landing-pattern of ships coming in to the space-port. You'll put it on
the opposite side of the planet. And you'll want it to stay out of the
way, where anybody can know it is at any time of the day or night
without having to calculate anything. So you'll put it out in orbit so
it will revolve around Weald in exactly one day, neither more or less,
and you'll put it above the equator. And then it will remain quite
stationary above one spot on the planet, a hundred and eighty degrees
longitude away from the landing-grid and directly over the equator."
He scribbled for a moment.
"Which means forty-two thousand miles high, give or take a few hundred,
and--here! And I was hunting for it in a close-in orbit!"
He grumbled to himself. He waited while the solar-system drive pushed
the Med Ship a quarter of the way around the bright planet below. The
sunset line vanished and the planet's disk became a complete circle.
Then Calhoun listened to the monitor earphones again, and grunted once
more, and changed course, and presently made a noise indicating
satisfaction.
Again presently he abandoned instrument-control and peered directly out
of a port, handling the solar-system drive with great care. Murgatroyd
said depressedly;
"_Chee!_"
"Stop worrying," commanded Calhoun. "We haven't been challenged, and
there is a beacon transmitter at work, just to make sure that nobody
bumps into what we're looking for. It's a great help, because we do want
to bump,--gently."
Stars swung across the port out of which he looked. Something dark
appeared,--and then straight lines and exact curvings. Even Maril,
despairing and bewildered as she was, caught sight of something vastly
larger than the Med Ship, floating in space. She stared. The Med Ship
maneuvered very cautiously. She saw another large object. A third. A
fourth. There seemed to be dozens of them.
They were space-ships, huge by comparison with Aesclipus Twenty. They
floated as the Med Ship did. They did not drive. They were not in
formation. They were not at even distances from each other. They did not
point in the same direction. They swung in emptiness like derelicts.
Calhoun jockeyed his small ship with infinite care. Presently there came
the gentlest of impacts and then a clanking sound. The appearance out
the vision-port became stationary, but still unbelievable. The Med Ship
was grappled magnetically to a vast surface of welded metal.
Calhoun relaxed. He opened a wall-panel and brought out a vacuum suit.
He began briskly to get it on.
"Things move smoothly," he commented. "We weren't challenged. So it's
extremely unlikely that we were spotted. Our friends on the floor ought
to begin to come to shortly. And I'm going to find out now whether I'm a
hero or in sure-enough trouble!"
Maril said drearily;
"I don't know what you've done, except--"
Calhoun blinked at her, in the act of hauling the vacuum suit over his
shoulders.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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