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Here's the communicator and there's the button. You might call the grid and arrange for us to be lifted." The young man seated himself at the control-board. Very professionally, he went through the routine of preparing to lift by landing-grid, which routine has not changed in two hundred years. He went briskly ahead until the order to lift. Then Calhoun stopped him. "Hold it!"
The condition shown by the landing-grid suspicions was a case in point. Blueskins were people who inherited a splotchy skin pigmentation from other people who'd survived a plague. Weald plainly maintained a one-planet quarantine against them. But a quarantine is normally an emergency measure. The Med Service should have taken over, wiped out the need for a quarantine, and then lifted it.
His memory of the terrain around the mining settlement told him that there was no definite destination in the girl's mind. But she was in no such despair as to want deliberately to be lost. She'd guessed, Calhoun believed, that if there were Darians on the planet, they'd keep the landing-grid under observation.
The condition shown by the landing-grid suspicions was a case in point. Blueskins were people who inherited a splotchy skin-pigmentation from other people who'd survived a plague. Weald plainly maintained a one-planet quarantine against them. But a quarantine is normally an emergency measure. The Med Service should have taken over, wiped out the need for a quarantine, and then lifted it.
"Interesting," said Bors, only half listening. "He was discharged," Morgan went on, "because he allowed a maintenance crew to disassemble, for repair, a vital relay in a landing-grid on the very day when three space-ships were scheduled for arrival. There was pandemonium, of course, because nothing could have landed there.
Everything was under splendid control where a landing force occupied the grid and all the ground immediately about it. The space admiral had headquarters in the landing-grid office. Reports came in, orders were issued, admirably crisp salutes were exchanged among sag-suited men. Everything was in perfect shape there. But there was panic among the ships in space.
There was something which cast a long, lacy shadow: the landing-grid. "But they don't answer our call," observed Calhoun, "so we go down unwelcomed." He inverted the Med Ship and the emergency rockets boomed. The ship plunged planetward. A long time later it was deep in the planet's atmosphere. The noise of its rockets had become thunderous, with air to carry and to reinforce the sound.
"There is a landing-grid," said Calhoun, frowning, "and if they're using it to load fresh meat for Dara, from the herds I'm told about, it should be manned. But they don't seem to intend to answer. Maybe they think that if they pretend I'm not here I'll go away." He reflected, and his frown deepened. "If I didn't know what I do know, I might.
This was night, and the men at the landing-grid had set a pattern of hunger, so that the silence and the dark buildings did not seem a sign of tranquility and sleep, but of exhaustion and despair. The highway lamps were few, by comparison with other inhabited worlds, and the groundcar needed lights of its own to guide its driver over a paved surface that needed repair.
Bitterness and fury surrounded Calhoun like a wall. Most of Dara would have liked to see him killed in a manner as atrocious as his crime, but no conceivable death would be satisfying. So the affair was coldly businesslike, with not even insults offered to him. He was left to stand alone in the very center of the landing-grid floor.
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