Pariah Planet Part 12

"I've the answer to that, too," said Calhoun curtly. "I'll want to talk to any s.p.a.ce-pilots you've got. Get your astrogators together and I think they'll approve my idea."

The silence was totally skeptical.

"Orede ..."

"Not Orede," said Calhoun. "Weald will be hunting that planet over for Darians. If they find any, they'll drop bombs here."

"Our only s.p.a.ce-pilots," said a tall man, presently, "are on Orede now.

If you've told the truth, they'll probably head back because of your warning. They should bring meat."

His mouth worked peculiarly, and Calhoun knew that it was at the thought of food.

"Which," said another man sharply, "goes to the hospitals! I haven't tasted meat in two years!"

"n.o.body has," growled another man still. "But here's this man Calhoun.

I'm not convinced he can work magic, but we can find out if he lies. Put a guard on his s.h.i.+p. Otherwise let our health men give him his head.

They'll find out if he's from this Medical Service he tells of! And this Maril--"

"I--can be identified," said Maril. "I was sent to gather information and sent it in secret writing to one of us on Trent. I have a family here. They'll know me! And I--there was someone who was working on foods, and I believe he--made it possible to use--all sorts of vegetation for food. He will identify me."

Someone laughed harshly.

"Oh, yes!" said a man with a blue forehead. "He's a valuable man! Within the year he's come up with a way to make his weeds taste like any food one chooses. If we decide to cut our population, we'll simply give the people to be eliminated all they want to eat of his products. They'll not be hungry. They'll be quite happy. But they'll die for lack of nourishment. He's volunteered to prove it painless by going through it himself!"

Maril swallowed.

"I'd like to see him," she repeated. "And my family."

Some of the blue-splotched men turned away. A broad-shouldered man said bluntly;

"Don't look for them to be glad to see you. And you'd better not show yourself in public. You've been well fed. You'll be hated for that."

Maril began to cry. Murgatroyd said bewilderedly;

"_Chee! Chee!_"

Calhoun held him close. There was confusion. And Calhoun found the Minister of Health at hand--he looked most harried of all the officials gathered to question Calhoun--and proposed that he get a look at the hospital situation right away.

It wasn't practical. With all the population on half rations or less, when night came people needed to sleep. Most people, indeed, slept as many hours out of the traditional twenty-four as they could manage. It was much more pleasant to sleep than to be awake and constantly nagged at by continued hunger. And there was the matter of simple decency.

Continuous gnawing hunger had an embittering effect upon everyone.

Quarrelsomeness was a common experience. And people who would normally be the leaders of opinion felt shame because they were obsessed by thoughts of food. It was best when people slept.

Still, Calhoun was in the hospitals by daybreak. What he found moved him to savage anger. There were too many sick children. In every case undernourishment contributed to their sickness. And there was not enough food to make them well. Doctors and nurses denied themselves food to spare it for their patients.

Calhoun brought out hormones and enzymes and medicaments from the Med s.h.i.+p while the guard in the s.h.i.+p looked on. He demonstrated the processes of synthesis and autocatalysis that enabled such small samples to be multiplied indefinitely. He was annoyed by a clamorous appet.i.te.

There were some doctors who ignored the irony of medical techniques being taught to cure non-nutritional disease, when everybody was half-fed, or less. They approved of Calhoun. They even approved of Murgatroyd when Calhoun explained his function.

He was, of course, a Med Service _tormal_, and _tormals_ were creatures of talent. They'd originally been found on a planet in the Deneb area, and they were engaging and friendly small animals, but the remarkable fact about them was that they couldn't contract any disease. Not any.

They had a built-in, explosive reaction to bacterial and viral toxins, and there hadn't yet been any pathogenic organism discovered to which a _tormal_ could not more or less immediately develop antibody-resistance.

So that in interstellar medicine _tormals_ were priceless. Let Murgatroyd be infected with however localized, however specialized an inimical organism, and presently some highly valuable defensive substance could be isolated from his blood and he'd remain in his usual exuberant good health. When the antibody was a.n.a.lyzed by those techniques of microa.n.a.lysis the Service had developed,--why--that was that. The antibody could be synthesized and one could attack any epidemic with confidence.

The tragedy for Dara was, of course, that no Med s.h.i.+p had come there, three generations ago, when the Dara plague raged. Worse, after the plague Weald was able to exert pressure which only a criminally incompetent Med Service director would have permitted. But criminal incompetence and its consequences was what Calhoun had been loaned to Sector Twelve to help remedy.

He was not at ease, though. No s.h.i.+p arrived from Orede to bear out his account of an attempt to get that lonely world evacuated before Weald discovered it had blueskins on it. Maril had vanished, to visit or return to her family, or perhaps to consult with the mysterious Korvan who'd arranged for her to leave Dara to be a spy, and had advised her simply to make a new life somewhere else, abandoning a famine-ridden, despised, and outcast world. Calhoun had learned of two achievements the same Korvan had made for his world. Neither was remarkably constructive. He'd offered to prove the value of the second by dying of it. Which might make him a very admirable character, or he could have a pa.s.sion for martyrdom,--which is much more common than most people think. In two days Calhoun was irritable enough from unaccustomed hunger to suspect the worst of him.

And there was Weald to worry about. Weald was hysterically resolved to end what it considered the blueskin menace for once and for all. There were parallels to such unreasoning frenzy even in the ancient history of Earth. A word still remained in the dictionaries referring to it.

Genocide.

Meanwhile Calhoun worked doggedly; in the hospitals while the patients were awake and in the Med s.h.i.+p--under guard--afterward. He had hunger cramps now, but he tested a plastic cube with a thriving biological culture in it. He worked at increasing his store of it. He'd snipped samples of pigmented skin from dead patients in the hospitals, and examined the pigmented areas, and very, very painstakingly verified a theory. It took an electron microscope to do it, but he found a virus in the blue patches which matched the type discovered on Tralee. The Tralee viruses had effects which were pa.s.sed on from mother to child, and heredity had been charged with the observed results of quasi-living viral particles. And then Calhoun very, very carefully introduced into a virus culture the material he had been growing in a plastic cube. He watched what happened.

He was satisfied, so much so that immediately afterward he barely managed to stagger off to bed.

That night the s.h.i.+p from Orede came in, packed with frozen b.l.o.o.d.y carca.s.ses of cattle. Calhoun knew nothing of it. But next morning Maril came back. There were shadows under her eyes and her expression was of someone who has lost everything that had meaning in her life.

"I'm all right," she insisted, when Calhoun commented. "I've been visiting my family. I've seen--Korvan. I'm quite all right."

"You haven't eaten any better than I have," Calhoun observed.

"I--couldn't!" admitted Maril. "My sisters--my little sisters--so thin.... There's rationing for everybody and it's all efficiently arranged. They even had rations for me. But I couldn't eat! I--gave most of my food to my sisters and they--squabbled over it!"

Calhoun said nothing. There was nothing to say. Then she said in a no less desolate tone;

"Korvan said I was foolish to come back."

"He could be right," said Calhoun.

"But I had to!" protested Maril. "Because I--I've been eating all I wanted to, on Weald and in the s.h.i.+p, and I'm ashamed because they're half-starved and I'm not. And when you see what hunger does to them ...

It's terrible to be half-starved and not able to think of anything but food!"

"I hope," said Calhoun, "to do something about that. If I can get hold of an astrogator or two."

"The--s.h.i.+p that was on Orede came in during the night," Maril told him shakily. "It was loaded with frozen meat, but one s.h.i.+p-load's not enough to make a difference on a whole planet! And if Weald hunts for us on Orede, we daren't go back for more meat."

She said abruptly;

"There are some prisoners. They were miners. They were crowded out of the s.h.i.+p. The Darians who'd stampeded the cattle took them prisoners.

They had to!"

"True," said Calhoun. "It wouldn't have been wise to leave Wealdians around on Orede with their throats cut. Or living, either, to tell about a rumor of blueskins. Even if their throats will be cut now. Is that the program?"

Maril s.h.i.+vered.

"No ... They'll be put on short rations like everybody else. And people will watch them. The Wealdians expect to die of plague any minute because they've been with Darians. So people look at them and laugh.

But it's not funny."