Murray Leinster - Pariah Planet

Calhoun put Murgatroyd into the Med Ship and went back to the spaceport office. A small space-boat, designed to inspect the circling grain-ships from time, was already aloft. The landing-grid had thrust it swiftly out most of the way. Now it droned and drove on sturdily toward the enigmatic ship.

Calhoun took no part in the agitated conferences among the officials and news reporters at the space-port. But he listened to the talk about him. As the investigating small ship drew nearer and nearer to the deathly-still cargo vessel, the guesses about the meaning of its breakout and following silence grew more and more wild. But, singularly, there was not one suggestion that the mystery might not be the work of blueskins. Blueskins were scapegoats for all the fears and all the uneasiness a perhaps over-civilized world developed.

Presently the investigating space-boat reached the mystery ship and circled it, beaming queries. No answer. It reported the cargo-ship dark. No lights shone anywhere on or in it. There were no induction-surges from even pulsing, idling engines. Delicately, the messenger-craft maneuvered until it touched the silent vessel. It reported that microphones detected no motion whatever inside.

"Let a volunteer go aboard," commanded the chief executive. "Have him report what he finds."

A pause. Then the solemn announcement of an intrepid volunteer's name, from far, far away. Calhoun listened, frowning darkly. This pompous heroism wouldn't be noticed in the Med Service. It would be routine behavior.

Suspenseful, second-by-second reports. The volunteer had rocketed himself across the emptiness between the two again-separated ships. He had opened the airlock from outside. He'd gone in. He'd closed the outer airlock door. He'd opened the inner. He reported.

The relayed report was almost incoherent, what with horror and incredulity and the feeling of doom that came upon the volunteer. The ship was a bulk-cargo ore-carrier, designed to run between Orede and Weald with cargoes of heavy-metal ores and a crew of no more than five men. There was no cargo in her holds now, though. Instead, there were men. They packed the ship. They filled the corridors. They had crawled into every cargo and other space where a man could find room to push himself. There were hundreds of them. It was insanity. And it had been greater insanity still for the ship to have taken off with so preposterous a load of living creatures.

But they weren't living any longer. The air apparatus had been designed for a crew of five. It could purify the air for possibly twenty or more. But there were hundreds of men in hiding as well as in plain view in the cargo-ship from Orede. There were many, many times more than her air apparatus and reserve tanks could possibly have serviced. They couldn't even have been fed during the journey from Orede to Weald!

But they hadn't starved. Air-scarcity killed them before the ship came out of overdrive.

A remarkable thing was that there was no written message in the ship's log which referred to its take-off. There was no memorandum of the taking on of such an impossible number of passengers.

"The blueskins did it," said the chief executive of Weald. He was pale. All about Calhoun men looked sick and shocked and terrified. "It was the blueskins! We'll have to teach them a lesson!" Then he turned to Calhoun. "The volunteer who went on that ship … He'll have to stay there, won't he? He can't be brought back to Weald without bringing contagion …"

Calhoun raged at him.

There was a certain coldness in the manner of those at the Weald spaceport when the Med Ship left next morning. Calhoun was not popular because Weald was scared. It had been conditioned to scare easily, where blueskins might be involved. Its children were trained to react explosively when the word "blueskin" was uttered in their hearing, and its adults tended to say "blueskin" when anything to cause uneasiness entered their minds. So a planet-wide habit of non-rational response had formed and was not seen to be irrational because almost everybody had it.

The volunteer who'd discovered the tragedy on the ship from Orede was safe, though. He'd made a completely conscientious survey of the ship he'd volunteered to enter and examine. For his courage, he'd have been doomed but for Calhoun. The reaction of his fellow-citizens was that by entering the ship he might have become contaminated by blueskin infective material if the plague still existed, and if the men in the ship had caught it – but they certainly hadn't died of it – and if there had been blueskins on Orede to communicate it – for which there was no evidence – and if blueskins were responsible for the tragedy. Which was at the moment pure supposition. But Weald feared he might bring death back to Weald if he were allowed to return.

Calhoun saved his life. He ordered that the guard-ship admit him to its airlock, which then was to be filled with steam and chlorine. The combination would sterilize and partly even eat away his space-suit, after which the chlorine and steam should be bled out to space, and air from the ship let into the lock. If he stripped off the space-suit without touching its outer surface, and reëntered the investigating ship while the suit was flung outside by a man in another space-suit, handling it with a pole he'd fling after it, there could be no possible contamination brought back.

Calhoun was quite right, but Weald in general considered that he'd persuaded the government to take an unreasonable risk.

There were other reasons for disapproving of him. Calhoun had been unpleasantly frank. The coming of the death-ship stirred to frenzy those people who believed that all blueskins should be exterminated as a pious act. They'd appeared on every visionscreen, citing not only the ship from Orede but other incidents which they interpreted as crimes against Weald. They demanded that all Wealdian atomic reactors be modified to turn out fusion-bomb materials while a space-fleet was made ready for an anti-blueskin crusade. They confidently demanded such a rain of fusion-bombs on Dara that no blueskin, no animal, no shred of vegetation, no fish in the deepest ocean, not even a living virus-particle of the blueskin plague could remain alive on the blueskin world!

One of these vehement orators even asserted that Calhoun agreed that no other course was possible, speaking for the Interstellar Medical Service. And Calhoun furiously demanded a chance to deny it by broadcast, and he made a bitter and indiscreet speech from which a planet-wide audience inferred that he thought them fools. He did.

So he was definitely unpopular when his ship lifted from Weald. He'd curtly given his destination as Orede, from which the death-ship had come. The landing-grid locked on, raised the small space-craft until Weald was a great shining ball below it, and then somehow scornfully cast him off. The Med Ship was free, in clear space where there was not enough of a gravitational field to hinder overdrive.

He aimed for his destination, his face very grim. He said savagely;

"Get set, Murgatroyd! Overdrive coming!"

He thumbed down the overdrive button. The universe of stars went out, while everything living in the ship felt the customary sensations of dizziness, of nausea, and of a spiralling fall to nothingness. Then there was silence. The Med Ship actually moved at a rate which was a preposterous number of times the speed of light, but it felt absolutely solid, absolutely firm and fixed. A ship in overdrive feels exactly as if it were buried deep in the core of a planet. There is no vibration. There is no sign of anything but solidity and – if one looks out a port – there is only utter blackness plus an absence of sound fit to make one's eardrums crack.

But within seconds random tiny noises began. There was a reel and there were sound-speakers to keep the ship from sounding like a grave. The reel played and the speakers gave off minute creakings, and meaningless hums, and very tiny noises of every imaginable sort, all of which were just above the threshold of the inaudible.