Life on other planets -- Fiction; Quarantine -- Fiction; Science fiction; Space medicine -- Fiction
The outer airlock door closed. The inner door opened. Dense white fog
came out of it. There was motion. Calhoun followed the fog out of the
lock. He carried objects which had been weightless, but were suddenly
heavy in the ship's gravity-field. There were two spacesuits and a
curious assortment of parcels. He spread them out, flipped aside his
faceplate, and said briskly, "This stuff is cold! Turn a heater on it,
will you, Maril?"
He began to work his way out of his own vacuum-suit.
"Item," he said. "The ships are fuelled _and_ provisioned. A practical
tribe, the Wealdians! The ships are ready to take off as soon as
they're warmed up inside. A half-degree sun doesn't radiate heat
enough to keep a ship warm, when the rest of the cosmos is effectively
near zero Kelvin. Here, point the heaters like this."
He adjusted the radiant-heat dispensers. The fog disappeared where
their beams played. But the metal spacesuits glistened and steamed,
and the steam disappeared within inches. They were so completely and
utterly cold that they condensed the air about them as a liquid, which
re-evaporated to make fog, which warmed up and disappeared and was
immediately replaced.
"Item," said Calhoun again, getting his arms out of the vacuum-suit
sleeves. "The controls are pretty nearly standard. Our sleeping
friends will be able to astrogate them back to Dara without trouble,
provided only that nobody comes out here to bother us before they
leave."
He shed the last of the spacesuit, stepping out of its legs.
"And," he finished wryly, "I brought back an emergency supply of ship
provisions for everybody concerned, but find that I'm idiot enough to
feel that they'll choke me if I eat them while Dara's still starving."
Maril said, "But there isn't any hope for Dara! No real hope!"
He gaped at her.
"What do you think we're here for?"
He set to work to restore his four recent students to consciousness.
It was not a difficult task. The dosage mixed in the coffee given them
as a graduation ceremony--the ceremony which had consisted solely of
drinking coffee and passing out--allowed for waking-up processes.
Calhoun took the precaution of disarming them first, but presently
four hot-eyed young men glared at him.
"I'm calling," said Calhoun, holding a blaster negligently in his
hand, "I'm calling for volunteers. There's a famine on Dara. There've
been unmanageable crop surpluses on Weald. On Dara, the government
grimly rations every ounce of food. On Weald, the government has been
buying surplus grain to keep the price up.
"To save storage costs, it's loaded the grain into out-of-date
spaceships it once used to stand sentry over Dara to keep it out of
space when there was another famine there. Those ships have been put
out in orbit, where we're hooked on to one of them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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