Calhoun seated himself at the control-desk. He threw switches there. He momentarily touched a button. There was a slight shock and the beginning of a roar outside. It cut off. Calhoun looked at the vision-plates showing outside. There was swirling smoke and steam. There were men running in headlong flight, leaving their ground-cars behind them.
"A slight touch of emergency-rocket," said Calhoun. "They've run away. Now we end the plague on Tallien Three."
The grid operator was still dazed by the continued absence of any indication that he might ever become a para. He said unsteadily:
"Sure! Sure! But how?"
"Wood-smoke," said Calhoun. "Emergency-rockets. Roofs! There's been no wood-smoke in the air on this planet because there are no forest fires and people don't burn fuel. They use electricity. So we start the largest production of wood-smoke that we find convenient, and the population of a certain modified butyl mercaptan molecule will be reduced. Down to a normal level. Immediately!"
The emergency-rocket bellowed thunderously, and the little Med Ship rose.
There have been, of course, emergency measures against contagion all through human history. There was a king of France, on Earth, who had all the lepers in his kingdom killed. There have been ships and houses burned to drive out plague, and quarantines which simply interfered with human beings were countless. Calhoun's measure on Tallien was somewhat more drastic than most, but it had good justification.
He set fire to the planet's capital city. The little Med Ship swept over the darkened buildings. Her emergency-rockets made thin pencils of flame two hundred feet long. She touched off roofs to the east, and Calhoun rose to see which way the wind blew. He descended and touched here and there . . .
Thick, seemingly suffocating masses of wood-smoke flowed over the city. They were not actually strangling, but they created panic. There was fighting in Government Center, but it stopped when the mysterious stuff—not one man in a hundred had ever seen burning wood or smelled its smoke—the fighting stopped and all men fled when a choking, reeking blanket rolled over the city and lay there.
It wasn't a great fire, considering everything. Less than ten percent of the city burned, but ninety-odd percent of the paras in it ceased to be paras. More, they had suddenly regained an invisible aversion to the smell of butyl mercaptan—even a modified butyl mercaptan—and it was promptly discovered that no normal who had smelled wood-smoke became a para. So all the towns and even individual farm-houses would hereafter make sure that there was pungent wood-smoke to be smelled from time to time by everybody.
But Calhoun did not wait for such pleasant news. He could not look for gratitude. He'd burned part of a city. He'd forced paras to stop being paras and become ashamed. And those who hadn't become paras wanted desperately to forget the whole matter as soon as possible. They couldn't, but gratitude to Calhoun would remind them. He took appropriate action.
With the grid operator landed again, and after the grid was operable once more and had sent the Med Ship a good five planetary diameters into space—some few hours after the ship was in overdrive again, Calhoun and Murgatroyd had coffee together. Murgatroyd zestfully licked his emptied tiny mug, to get the last least taste of the beverage. He said happily, "Chee!" He wanted more.
"Coffee," said Calhoun severely, "has become a habit with you, Murgatroyd! If this abnormal appetite develops too far, you might start yawning at me, which would imply that your desire for it was uncontrollable. A yawn caused by what is called a yen has been known to make a man dislocate his jaw. You might do that. You wouldn't like it!"
Murgatroyd said, "Chee!"
"You don't believe it, eh?" said Calhoun. Then he said, "Murgatroyd, I'm going to spend odd moments all the rest of my life wondering about what happens to Doctor Lett. They'll kill him, somehow. But I suspect they'll be quite gentle with him. There's no way to imagine a punishment that would really fit! Isn't that more interesting than coffee?"
"Chee! Chee! Chee!" said Murgatroyd insistently.
"It wasn't wise to stay and try to make an ordinary public-health inspection. We'll send somebody else when things are back to normal."
"Chee!!!" said Murgatroyd loudly.
"Oh, all right!" said Calhoun. "If you're going to be emotional about it, pass your cup."
He reached out his hand, Murgatroyd put his tiny mug in it. Calhoun refilled it. Murgatroyd sipped zestfully.
The Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty went on in overdrive, back toward sector headquarters of the Interstellar Medical Service.
QUARANTINE WORLD
I
There wasn't a thing he could put his finger on, but from the beginning Calhoun didn't feel comfortable about the public health situation on Lanke. There wasn't anything really wrong about it, not anything. Calhoun felt that it was just a little bit too good to be true. He and Murgatroyd the tormal had arrived in the little Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty. They'd been greeted with effusive cordiality. Health Department officials opened everything to Calhoun's examination, with a smoothness and speed that almost looked like the planetary authorities were anxious for him to finish his job and get away from there. The Health Minister practically jumped through hoops to provide all the information he could ask for. The communicable diseases appeared to be well in hand. The average age-at-death rate for the planet was the fraction of a decimal-point low, but it was accounted for by a microscopic rise in the accidental-death reports. Calhoun couldn't find a thing to justify the feeling that a cover-up job was being done. If it was, it was being done perfectly. He was a little bit irritated by his own suspicions.
Still, he went through the routine for three sunny days and evenings. He had some new developments in the art of medicine that Med Service Headquarters wanted to have spread about. He explained them to attentive listeners. In turn, he listened interestedly to what he was told, and the night before he was to lift off for his return to headquarters he attended a top-drawer medical society meeting in a high ceilinged lecture hall in the Health Department building.
The Health Minister introduced him in a typical speech in which he expressed the value of modern medical science in strictly businessman terms. He mentioned that absenteeism due to sickness was at the lowest figure ever known in the industries of Lanke. The extension of hormone-balance checkups, with other preventive practices, had reduced the overall incidence of sickness requiring hospitalization to the point where in the past ten years or so many thousands of hospital beds had ceased to be required. Which added so many millions of credits every year to the prosperity of Lanke.
There was another item which nobody thought about, but was perhaps the most valuable of all the achievements of medical science. He referred to the fact that epidemics were now substantially impossible. It was not necessary to calculate what an actual epidemic might cost. One could think simply of what the danger might be to see what medical science added to the planetary wealth. In interstellar trade alone, the simple threat of a dangerous plague on Lanke would mean the quarantining of the planet, and that would mean a financial panic, the closing of factories whose products could not be sold, widespread unemployment, appalling drops in the values of securities, and it could mean runs on banks, the abandonment of construction projects and even curtailment of agricultural production. The wealth that modern medical science contributed to the economy was the true great achievement of the medical profession! Much of this achievement was due to Lanke physicians alone, but the Interstellar Medical Service had made its contributions too, and he was happy to present to them Doctor Calhoun of that Service, whom many of them had met and talked to in the past few days.