Life on other planets -- Fiction; Quarantine -- Fiction; Science fiction; Space medicine -- Fiction
Then, in this case at any rate, there was the very finicky task of
picking out a fourth-magnitude star of whose planets one was his
destination. He aimed for it with ultra-fine precision.
"Overdrive coming," he said presently. "Hold on!"
Space reeled. There was nausea and giddiness and a horrible sensation
of falling in a wildly unlikely spiral. Then stillness, and solidity,
and the blackness outside the Med Ship. The little craft was in
overdrive again.
After a long while, the girl Maril said uneasily, "I don't know what
you plan now--"
"I'm going to Dara," said Calhoun. "On Orede I tried to get the
blueskins there to get going, fast. Maybe I succeeded. I don't know.
But this thing's been mishandled! Even if there's a famine people
shouldn't do things out of desperation! Being desperate jogs the brain
off-center. One doesn't think straight!"
"I know now that I was ... very foolish."
"Forget it," commanded Calhoun. "I wasn't talking about you. Here I
run into a situation that the Med Service should have caught and
cleaned up generations ago! But it's not only a Med Service
obligation; it's a current mess! Before I could begin to get at the
basic problem, those idiots on Orede--It'd happened before I reached
Weald! An emotional explosion triggered by a ship full of dead men
that nobody intended to kill."
Maril shook her head.
"Those Darian characters," said Calhoun, annoyed, "shouldn't have gone
to Orede in the first place. If they went there, they should at least
have stayed on a continent where there were no people from Weald
digging a mine and hunting cattle for sport on their off days! They
could be spotted! I believe they were.
"And again, if it had been a long way from the mine installation, they
could probably have wiped out the people who sighted them before they
could get back with the news! But it looks like miners saw men
hunting, and got close enough to see they were blueskins, and then got
back to the mine with the news!"
She waited for him to explain.
"I know I'm guessing, but it fits!" he said distastefully. "So
something had to be done. Either the mining settlement had to be wiped
out or the story that blueskins were on Orede had to be discredited.
The blueskins tried for both. They used panic gas on a herd of cattle
and it made them crazy and they charged the settlement like the
four-footed lunatics they are!
"And the blueskins used panic gas on the settlement itself as the
cattle went through. It should have settled the whole business nicely.
After it was over every man in the settlement would believe he'd been
out of his head for a while, and he'd have the crazy state of the
settlement to think about.
"He wouldn't be sure of what he'd seen or heard before-hand. They
might try to verify the blueskin story later, but they wouldn't
believe anything with certainty. It should have worked!"
Again she waited.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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