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"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.
Calhoun headed back for the valley, the settlement and the Med Ship. Murgatroyd clung to his neck. The girl Maril followed visibly shaken. Calhoun did not speak to her again. He led the way. A mile back toward the mountains, they began to see stragglers from the now-vanished herd. A little further, those stragglers began to notice them.
There was confusion, as if the request were so unusual that the answers were not ready. The grid, too, was on the planet's night side. Presently the ship was locked onto by the grid's force-fields. It went downward without incident. Calhoun saw that Maril sat tensely, twisting her fingers within each other, until the ship actually touched ground.
It would assuredly take care of two patients. But a Med Ship man would also have known that it was simply one of those scrupulous precautions a Med Ship man takes when using cultures from store. Calhoun put the sample away and called Maril back. "It was nothing," he explained, "but you might have felt uncomfortable. We simply had a bit of Med Service routine that had to be gone through.
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. 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.
They had a history of isolation and outlawry, and long experience of being regarded as less than human. In cold fact, Calhoun had no power at all. "May I ask whose influence you'll exert?" asked Calhoun. "There's a man," said Maril reservedly, "who thinks a great deal of me. I don't know his present official position, but he was certain to become prominent.
He added the notes that Maril had made for him, of Murgatroyd's pulse and blood pressure after the injection of the same culture that produced fever and thirstiness in himself and later, without contact with him or the culture, in Maril. He put a professional comment at the end: The culture seems to have retained its normal characteristics during long storage in the spore state.
Maril was interviewed repeatedly, as the person best able to discuss him, and she did his reputation no harm. That was not all that happened on Dara ... There was something else. Very curious thing, too. There was a curious spread of mild symptoms which nobody could exactly call a disease. It lasted only a few hours.
Then he opened the airlock door, hating the fact that he shook and trembled. He urged the girl and Murgatroyd in. He slammed the outer airlock door just as another blast-bolt hit. "They they don't realize," said Maril desperately. "If they only knew...." "Talk to them, if you like," said Calhoun. His teeth chattered and he raged, because the symptom was of terror he denied.
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.
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