He pressed a button. As had happened once before in this place, a slender blue-white flame appeared under the stern-most part of the Med Ship's hull. It was the emergency rocket, by which the ship had landed. Now the ship was held fast by mud. It would have required a pull or push of many times the Med Ship's weight to break the suction of the mud. The rockets, as rockets, could not conceivably have pushed the spacecraft clear.
But the rocket flame bored deep down into the ground. It vaporized the water beneath it. It volatilized the ground. For eight feet down in the valley bottom's water-saturated soil, the flame bored its way. Steam pressure developed. Steam bubbles of enormous size came up. Steam broke surfaces, heaving up masses of semi-solid valley bottom and escaping at the jagged edges of the cracks between masses. The Med Ship ceased to rest upon an adhesive mass of muck, packed over the feet at the bottom of the landing-fins. The Med Ship actually floated on a mixture of solidities and semi-solidities and steam. It wasn't using the propulsive power of its rockets, at all. It used their steam-generating capacity.
She shot upward before the spaceboat could fire a shell at her. She went up three thousand feet before Calhoun cut down on the rocket power. Then he peered carefully, tilted the ship and let it drop. The valley bottom seemed to leap up. The spaceboat spouted rocket flame. Calhoun dashed at it, seeming to intend a crashing collision in mid-air. He missed it by feet. He swooped and circled and dashed in at it again. The spaceboat dodged frantically.
"I'm doing this in atmosphere," said Calhoun, with an air of apology, "because they made a leak in the hull. I have to take care of the spaceboat. It shouldn't leave Delhi."
The spaceboat fired a cannon-shell. It went completely wild. Calhoun swept in, flipped the Med Ship end for end, and his rocket flame would have cut the spaceboat in two had he swung one of his controls the quarter of an inch. He didn't. Instead he flung the Med Ship about until it was borne in upon the crew of the spaceboat. They had run up against a professional in spacecraft handling. He literally drove the spaceboat down and down and down—and he could have destroyed it a dozen times over—until at the last it made a panicky landing and figures leaped out of it and fled away.
Calhoun made the Med Ship hover above it, fifty feet high, with that deadly star-temperature flame of the rockets drilling through the hull, through the patches, and into the interior.
It was only when flames burst out of cracks and crevices all over the grounded freakish spacecraft that he lifted the Med Ship and headed away over the horizon.
He landed once more on Delhi, some hundreds of miles away on the single continent this planet owned. He was very tired, then. He ordered Rob and Elna out of his ship.
"Nobody should leave Delhi but me," he repeated politely. "So you get out. There'll be a hospital ship here within a week, two at the outside. Are you two going to be married?"
Rob said with dignity, "Not unless the plague is defeated and we can go where we please, not if our children would have to stay on Delhi and gradually become savages."
"I'll send you a wedding present by the hospital ship," promised Calhoun. "You did me a great favor. Thanks."
He closed the air-lock. He looked at a dial. The reserve-tanks of the Med Ship had been emptied, in blowing sulfur smoke out of the single puncture in its hull. He had been pumping them up to normal reserve pressure again, and this was Delhi air. Anybody who got the plague had only to stay in Delhi air and he would be cured. However, there was work for the Med Service to do to arrange that he not relapse when he went out of Delhi air again, nor give the plague to anybody else. There'd be no difficulty about that. The Med Service had solved much more difficult problems.
Calhoun sealed the hull-puncture with a quick-setting plastic. He sealed off the compartment whose wall had been pierced. He went down to the control-room. He blinked as he set the rockets to roaring again and the Med Ship climbed for the sky.
An hour later he was intolerably tired. He aimed the Med Ship for that far-off small star-cluster which was its home. With extra care, because of his weariness, he verified what he'd done. Then he said, "Overdrive coming, Murgatroyd. Five—four—three—two—one."
There was a revolting dizziness and an appalling nausea and then the feeling of a spinning drop to nowhere. Then the Med Ship was in overdrive. It felt solid as a rock. There was no sound but the background tape producing almost inaudible noises of traffic, and rain, and surf, and music, and human voices. There was even faint laughter.
Calhoun yawned.
"Murgatroyd?"
"Chee-chee!" said Murgatroyd shrilly. "Chee?"
"Take over the ship," commanded Calhoun. "If any emergencies turn up, you take care of them. I'm going to bed!"
And he did.
THE GRANDFATHERS' WAR
I
" . . . No man can be fully efficient if he expects praise or appreciation for what he does. The uncertainty of this reward, as experienced, leads to modification of one's actions to increase its probability . . . If a man permits himself the purpose of securing admiration, he tends to make that purpose primary and the doing of his proper work secondary. This costs human lives . . ."
Manual, Interstellar Medical Service. Pp. 17–18
The little Med Ship seemed absolutely motionless when the hour-off warning whirred. Then it continued to seem motionless. The background-noise tapes went on, making the small, unrelated sounds that exist unnoticed in all the places where human beings dwell, but which have to be provided in a ship in overdrive so a man doesn't go ship-happy from the dead stillness. The hour-off warning was notice of a change in the shape of things.
Calhoun put aside his book—the manual of the Med Service—and yawned. He got up from his bunk to tidy ship. Murgatroyd, the tormal, opened his eyes and regarded him drowsily, without uncoiling his furry tail from about his nose.
"I wish," said Calhoun critically, "that I could act with your realistic appraisal of facts, Murgatroyd. This is a case of no importance whatever, and you treat it as such, while I fume whenever I think of its futility. We are a token mission, Murgatroyd—a politeness of the Med Service, which has to respond to hysterical summonses as well as sensible ones. Our time is thrown away!"
Murgatroyd blinked somnolently. Calhoun grinned wryly at him. The Med Ship was a fifty-ton space-vessel—very small indeed, in these days—with a crew consisting exclusively of Calhoun and Murgatroyd the tormal. It was one of those little ships the Med Service tries to have call at every colonized planet at least once in four or five years. The idea is to make sure that all new developments in public health and individual medicine will spread as widely and as fast as can be managed. There were larger Med craft to handle dangerous situations and emergencies of novel form. But all Med Ships were expected to handle everything possible, if only because space travel consumed such quantities of time.
This particular journey, for example: An emergency message had come to Sector Headquarters from the planetary government of Phaedra II. Carried on a commercial vessel in overdrive at many times the speed of light, it had taken three months to reach Headquarters. And the emergency in which it asked aid was absurd. There was, said the message, a state of war between Phaedra II and Canis III. Military action against Canis III would begin very shortly. Med Service aid for injured and ill would be needed. It was therefore requested at once.
The bare idea of war, naturally, was ridiculous. There could not be war between planets. Worlds communicated with each other by spaceships, to be sure, but the Lawlor interplanetary drive would not work save in unstressed space, and of course overdrive was equally inoperable in a planet's gravitational field. So a ship setting out for the stars had to be lifted not less than five planetary diameters from the ground before it could turn on any drive of its own. Similarly, it had to be lowered an equal distance to a landing after its drive became unusable. Space travel was practical only because there were landing grids—those huge structures of steel which used the power of a planet's ionosphere to generate the force-fields for the docking and launching of ships of space. Hence landing grids were necessary for landings. And no world would land a hostile ship upon its surface. But a landing grid could launch bombs or missiles as well as ships, and hence could defend its planet, absolutely. So there could be no attacks and there could be defense, so wars could not be fought.