Part 6

They scattered. Twenty yards apart, they began to move across the park. Other men arrived and strengthened the cordon toward which he was supposed to be driven. A fly could not have escaped.

Those who marched across the park began methodically to burn it to ashes before them with their blasters.

Calhoun watched. Then he remembered something and was appalled. Among the fugitives in the glade, Kim Walpole had asked hungrily if they whose lives he had saved could not do something to help him. And he'd said that if they saw the smoke of a good-sized fire in the city they might investigate. He'd had no faintest intention of calling on them. But they might see this cloud of smoke and believed he wanted them to come and help!

"Damn!" he said wryly to Murgatroyd. "After all, there's a limit to any one series of actions with probable favorable chance consequences. I'd better start a new one. We might have whittled them down and made the unwhittled ones run away, but I had to start using a car! And then they'd try to blame me for everything. So--we start all over with a new policy."

He explored the building quickly. He prepared his measures. He went back to the window from which he'd looked. He cracked its window.

He opened fire with his blaster. The range was long, but with the beam cut down to minimum spread he'd knocked over a satisfying number of the men below before they swarmed toward the building, sending before them a barrage of blaster-fire that shattered the windows and had the stone façade smoking furiously.

"This," said Calhoun, "is an occasion where we have to change their advantage in numbers and weapons into an unfavorable circumstance for them. They'll be brave because they're many. Let's go!"

* * * * *

He met the two ground-car loads of refugees with his arms in the air. He did not want to be shot down by mistake. He said hurriedly, when Kim and the other lean survivors gathered about him:

"Everything's all right. We've a pack of prisoners but we won't bother to feed them intravenously for the moment. How'd you get the ground-cars?"

"Hunters," said Kim savagely. "We found them and killed them and took their cars. We found some other refugees, too, and I cured them--at least they will be cured. When we saw the smoke we started for the city. Some of us still have the plague, but we've all had our serum shots." His face worked. "When we started for the city, another car overtook us. Naturally he wasn't suspicious of a car! We blasted him. Half of us have arms, now."

"I don't think we need them," said Calhoun. "Our prisoners are quite peacefully sleeping. They stormed a building where I'd fired on them, and I'd dumped some dextrethyl in the air-conditioning system. They keeled over. Later, Murgatroyd and I went in and made their slumber more ... ah ... lasting with polysulfate. The few who weren't caught were ... ah ... demoralized. I think the city's clean, now. But we've got to get to the landing-grid control room. There are some calls coming in from space. I think the first shipload of colonists is arriving. I didn't answer, so they went in orbit around the planet. I want you people to talk to them."

"We'll bring their ship down," said the bearded man hungrily, "and blast them as they come out the exit port!"

Calhoun shook his head.

"To the contrary," he said regretfully. "You'll put on the clothes of some of our prisoners. You'll tell the arriving colonists that the plague hit you, too. You'll pretend to be one of the characters we really have safely sleeping, and you'll say all the rest have been bowled over by the plague that was sowed here to win the planet for the characters you're talking to. If they land, they'll die--or so you'll tell them. And so they will all go home, very unhappy, and they'll tell the public about it. And there will be no more shiploads of colonists arriving. We don't want them. If we persuade them to go home and not come back, there are fewer chances of unfavorable consequences to us."

The bearded man growled. But later he was one of the most convincing of the scarecrow figures whose images appeared in the vision-plates of the ship overhead. He was especially pathetic and alarming. When he'd finished, there'd have been a mass mutiny of the passengers had the spaceship skipper tried to land them.

Later, all the fugitives were very conscientious about bringing the captive invaders out of the lethargy that had been begun by dextrethyl and reinforced by polysulfate. They enjoyed their labor, after Calhoun explained.

"They came in their own ship," he said mildly, "and it's still in the landing grid--which they repaired for us, by the way. And I've been aboard the ship with Kim, here, and we've smashed their drive and communicators, and wrecked their Duhanne circuits. We took out the breech-plugs of their rockets and dumped their rocket fuel. Of course we removed their landing boats. So we're going to put them in their ship and hoist them up to space with the landing grid, and we're going to set them in a lovely orbit, to wait until we've time to spare for them. Up there they can't run or land or even signal if another shipload of colonists turns up. They'll feed themselves and they won't need guarding, and they'll be quite safe until we get help from Dettra. And that will come as soon as the Med Service has told Dettra that it wasn't a plague but an invasion that seemed to take their colony away from them."

"But--" That was Kim Walpole, frowning.

"I'm bringing my ship to the grid," said Calhoun, "and we'll recharge my Duhanne cells and replace my vision screens. I can make it here on rocket power, but it's a long way back to Headquarters. So I'll report, and a field team will come here from Med Service to get the exact data on the plague, and just how the synergy factor worked, and to make everything safe for the people the city was built for. Incidentally, I've a tiny blood-sample from Helen that they can get to work on for the bacteriology."

Kim said, frowning:

"I wish we could do something for you!"

"Put up a statue," said Calhoun dryly, "and in twenty years nobody will know what it was for. You and Helen are going to be married, aren't you?" When Kim nodded, Calhoun said, "In course of time, if you remember and think it worth while, you may inflict a child with my name. That child will wonder why, and ask, and so my memory will be kept green for a full generation!"

"Longer than that!" insisted Kim. "You'll never be forgotten here!"

Calhoun grinned at him.

* * * * *

Three days later, which was six days longer than he'd expected to be aground on Maris III, the landing grid heaved the little Med Ship out to space. The beautiful, nearly-empty city dwindled as the grid-field took the tiny spacecraft out to five planetary diameters and there released it. And Calhoun spun the Med Ship about and oriented it carefully for that place in the Cephis cluster where Med Service Headquarters was, and threw the overdrive switch.

The universe reeled. Calhoun's stomach seemed to turn over twice, and he had a sickish feeling of spiraling dizzily in what was somehow a cone. He swallowed. Murgatroyd made gulping noises. There was no longer a universe preceptible about the ship. There was dead silence. Then those small random noises began which have to be provided if a man is not to crack up in the dead stillness of a ship traveling at thirty times the speed of light.

Then there was nothing more to do. In overdrive travel there is never anything to do but pass the time away.

Murgatroyd took his right-hand whiskers in his right paw and licked them elaborately. He did the same to his left-hand whiskers. He contemplated the cabin, deciding upon a soft place in which to go to sleep.

"Murgatroyd," said Calhoun severely, "I have to have an argument with you! You imitate us humans too much! Kim Walpole caught you prowling around with an injector, starting to give our prisoners another shot of polysulfate! It might have killed them! Personally, I think it would have been a good idea, but in a medical man it would have been most unethical. We professional men have to curb our impulses! Understand?"

"_Chee!_" said Murgatroyd. He curled up and wrapped his tail meticulously about his nose, preparing to doze.

Calhoun settled himself comfortably in his bunk. He picked up a book. It was Fitzgerald on "Probability and Human Conduct."

He began to read as the ship went on through emptiness.

THE END