Pariah Planet Part 4

"_Chee-chee-chee!_"

"A very sensible suggestion," observed Calhoun. "We'll sit down and have a cup of coffee." To the girl he said, "I'll take you to Orede, since that's where you say you want to go."

"I--there's a boy there--"

Calhoun shook his head.

"No," he said reprovingly. "Nearly all the mining colony had packed itself into the s.h.i.+p that came into Weald with everybody dead. But not all. And there's been no check of what men were in the s.h.i.+p and what men weren't. You wouldn't go to Orede if it were likely your fellow had died on the way to you. Here's your coffee. Sugar or saccho, and do you take cream?"

She trembled a little, but she took the cup.

"I--don't understand--."

"Murgatroyd and I," explained Calhoun--and he did not know whether he spoke out of anger or something else--"we are do-gooders. We go around trying to keep people from getting killed. It's our profession. We practise it even on our own behalf. We want to stay alive. So since you make such drastic threats, we will take you where you want to go.

Especially since we're going there anyhow."

"You--don't believe anything I've said!" It was a statement.

"Not a word," admitted Calhoun. "But you'll probably tell us something more believable presently. When did you eat last?"

"Yesterday--."

"Better have something now. We'll talk more later." Calhoun showed her how to punch the readier for such-and-such dishes, to be extracted from storage and warmed or chilled, as the case might be, and served at dialed-for intervals.

Calhoun deliberately immersed himself in the Galactic Directory, looking up the planet Orede. He was headed there, but he'd had no reason to inform himself about it before. Now he read with every appearance of absorption.

The girl ate daintily. Murgatroyd watched with highly amiable interest.

But she looked acutely uncomfortable.

Calhoun finished with the Directory. He got out the microfilm reels which contained more information. He was specifically after the Med Service history of all the planets in this sector. He went through the filmed record of every inspection ever made on Weald and on Dara. But Sector Twelve had not been well-run. There was no adequate account of a plague which had wiped out three-quarters of the population of an inhabited planet! It had happened shortly after one Med s.h.i.+p visit, and was over before another Med s.h.i.+p came by. But there should have been painstaking investigation, even after the fact. There should have been a collection of infective material and a reasonably complete identification and study of the infective agent. It hadn't been made.

There was probably some other emergency at the time, and it slipped by.

But Calhoun--whose career was not to be spent in this sector--resolved on a blistering report about this negligence and its consequences.

He kept himself casually busy, ignoring the girl. A Med s.h.i.+p man has resources of study and meditation with which to occupy himself during overdrive travel from one planet to another. Calhoun made use of those resources. He acted as if he were completely unconscious of the stowaway. But Murgatroyd watched her with charmed attention.

Hours after her discovery, she said uneasily;

"Please?"

Calhoun looked up.

"Yes?"

"I--don't know exactly how things stand."

"You are a stowaway," said Calhoun. "Legally, I have the right to put you out the airlock. It doesn't seem necessary. There's a cabin. When you're sleepy, use it. Murgatroyd and I can make out quite well here.

When you're hungry, you now know how to get something to eat. When we land on Orede, you'll probably go about whatever business you have there. That's all."

She stared at him.

"But--you don't believe what I've told you!"

"No," agreed Calhoun. But he didn't add to the statement.

"But--I will tell you," she offered. "The police were after me. I had to get away from Weald! I had to! I'd stolen--"

He shook his head.

"No," he said. "If you were a thief, you'd say anything in the world except that you were a thief. You're not ready to tell the truth yet.

You don't have to, so why tell me anything? I suggest that you get some sleep."

She rose slowly. Twice her lips parted as if to speak again, but then she went into the other cabin and closed herself in.

Murgatroyd blinked at the place where she'd disappeared and then climbed up into Calhoun's lap, with complete a.s.surance of welcome. He settled himself and was silent for moments. Then he said;

"_Chee!_"

"I believe you're right," said Calhoun. "She doesn't belong on Weald, or with the conditioning she'd have had, there'd be only one place she'd dread worse than Orede, and that would be Dara. But I doubt she'd be afraid to land even on Dara."

Murgatroyd liked to be talked to. He liked to pretend that he carried on a conversation, like humans.

"_Chee-chee!_" he said with conviction.

"Definitely," agreed Calhoun. "She's not doing this for her personal advantage. Whatever she thinks she's doing, it's more important to her than her own life. Murgatroyd--"

"_Chee?_" said Murgatroyd in an inquiring tone.

"There are wild cattle on Orede," said Calhoun. "Herds and herds of them. I have a suspicion that somebody's been shooting them. Lots of them. Do you agree? Don't you think that a lot of cattle have been slaughtered on Orede lately?"

Murgatroyd yawned. He settled himself still more comfortably in Calhoun's lap.

"_Chee,_" he said drowsily.

He went to sleep, while Calhoun continued the examination of highly condensed information. Presently he looked up the normal rate of increase, with other data, among herds of _bivis domesticus_ in a wild state, on planets where they have no natural enemies. It wasn't unheard-of for a world to be stocked with useful types of Terran fauna and flora before it was attempted to be colonized. Terran life-forms could play the devil with alien ecological systems, very much to humanity's benefit. Familiar microorganisms and a standard vegetation added to the practicality of human settlements on otherwise alien worlds. But sometimes the results were strange.

They weren't often so strange, however, as to cause some hundreds of men to pack themselves frantically aboard a cargo-s.h.i.+p which couldn't possibly sustain them, so that every man must die while the s.h.i.+p was in overdrive.

Still, by the time Calhoun turned in on a spare pneumatic mattress, he had calculated that as few as a dozen head of cattle, turned loose on a suitable planet, would have increased to herds of thousands or tens or even hundreds of thousands in much less time than had probably elapsed.

The Med s.h.i.+p drove on in seemingly absolute solidity, with no sound from without, with no sight to be seen outside, with no evidence at all that it was not buried deep in the heart of a planet instead of flas.h.i.+ng through emptiness at a speed so great as to have no meaning.

Next s.h.i.+p-day the girl looked oddly at Calhoun when she appeared in the control-room. "Shall I--have breakfast?" she asked uncertainly.

"Why not?"