Calhoun used nearly the last of his fuel for height while he said crisply on the spacephone:
"Calling fleet! Calling fleet! Med Ship calling fleet! I've disabled the landing grid on Canopolis. You can come in now and take care of the sick. There are no weapons aground to speak of and if you don't get trigger-happy there should be no fighting. I'll be landed off somewhere in the hills to the north of the town. If the local inhabitants don't pack explosives out and crack the ship to get at me, I'll have the facts on the antibody ready for you. In fact, as soon as I get down I'll give them to you by spacephone, just in case."
It was a near thing, though. His rocket fuel was exhausted when he hit the ground. The flame sputtered and stopped when the ship was three feet from touching. It fell over, splintering trees. It was distinctly a rough landing.
Murgatroyd was very indignant about it. He scolded shrilly while Calhoun unstrapped himself from the chair and when he looked out to see where they were.
It was a week later when the Med Ship—brought to the grid for repair and refueling—was ready for space again. The original landing grid still stood, of course. But it was straddled and overwhelmed, huge as it was, by the utterly gigantic flying grid from Phaedra. There were not many ships aground, though. As Calhoun moved toward the control building, now connected by cable to the control quarters in the flying grid, one of the few ships remaining seemed to fall toward the sky. A second ship followed only seconds later.
He went into the control building. Walker the elder, from Phaedra, nodded remotely as he entered. The younger Walker scowled at him. He had been in consultation with his father, and the atmosphere was one of great reserve.
"Hm-m-m," said the elder Walker, gruffly. "What's the report?"
"Fairly good," said Calhoun. "There was one lot of antibody that seems to have been a trifle under strength. But the general situation seems satisfactory. There'll be a few more cases of one thing and another, of course—cases that are incubating now. But they'll do all right on the antibody shots. They have so far, at any rate." He said to the younger Walker, "You did a very good job rounding up the thirteen-to-fifteen-year-olds to escort the fleet doctors and handle the patients for them. They took themselves very seriously. They were ideal for the job. Your young-warrior group—"
"A lot of them," said young Walker dourly, "have taken to the woods. They swear they'll never give in!"
"How about the girls?"
Young Walker shrugged.
"They're fluttering about and beginning to talk about clothes. When older women arrive there'll be dressmaking—"
"And the lads in the woods," said Calhoun, "will come out to fascinate, and be fascinated instead. Do you think there'll be really much trouble?"
"No-o-o," said young Walker sourly. "Some of . . . our younger crowd seem relieved to be rid of responsibility."
"But," interposed the older Walker, gruffly, "he wants it. He thrives on it. He'll get it!" He hrrumphed. "The same with the others who showed what they could do here. We oldsters need them. We don't plan any . . . ah . . . reprisals."
Calhoun raised his eyebrows.
"Should I be surprised?"
The older Walker snorted.
"You didn't expect us to fall into each other's arms after what's happened, did you? No! But we are going to try to ignore our . . . differences as much as we can. We won't forget them, though."
"I suspect," said Calhoun, "that they'll be harder to remember than you think. You had a culture that split apart. Its pieces were incomplete—and a society has to be complete to survive. It isn't a human invention. It's something we have an instinct for—as birds have an instinct to build nests. When we build a culture according to our instincts, we get along. When that's impossible—there's trouble." Then he said, "I'm not trying to lecture you."
"Oh," said the elder Walker. "You aren't?"
Calhoun grinned.
"I thought I'd be the most unpopular man on this planet," he said cheerfully. "And I am. I interfered in everybody's business and nobody carried out his plans the way he wanted to. But at least nobody feels like he won. You'll be pleased when I lift the quarantine and take off, won't you?"
The older Walker said scornfully:
"We're paying no attention to your quarantine! Our fleet's loading up our wives on Phaedra, to ferry them here as fast as overdrive will do it. D'you think we'd pay any attention to your quarantine?"
Calhoun grinned again. The younger Walker said painfully:
"I suppose you think we should—" He stopped, and said very carefully: "What you did was for our good, all right, but it hurts us more than it does you. In twenty years, maybe, we'll be able to laugh at ourselves. Then we'll feel grateful. Now we know what we owe you, but we don't like it."
"And that," said Calhoun, "means that everything is back to normal. That's the traditional attitude toward all medical men—owe them a lot and hate to pay. I'll sign the quarantine release and take off as soon as you give me some rocket fuel, just in case of emergency."
"Right away!" said the two Walkers, in unison.
Calhoun snapped his fingers. Murgatroyd swaggered to his side. Calhoun took the little tormal's black paw in his hand.
"Come along, Murgatroyd," he said cheerfully. "You're the only person I really treated badly, and you don't mind. I suppose the moral of all this is that a tormal is a man's best friend."