He searched for the ship that had him fast. Nothing. He stepped up the magnification of his visionscreens. Again nothing. The sun Canis flamed ahead and below, and there were suspiciously bright stars which by their coloring were probably planets. But the Med Ship was still well beyond the habitable part of a Sol-class sun's solar system.
Calhoun pulled a photocell out of its socket and waited. A new and very bright light winked into being. It wavered. He stuck the photocell to the screen, covering the brightness. He plugged its cord to an audio amplifier. A dull humming sounded. Not quite as clearly as a spacephone voice, but clear enough, a voice said:
"If you are Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty, answer by light beam, quoting your orders."
Calhoun was already stabbing another button, and somewhere a signal-lamp was extruding itself from its recess in the hull. He said irritably:
"I'll show my orders, but I do not put on performances of dramatic readings! This is the devil of a business! I came here on request, to be a ministering angel or a lady with a lamp, or something equally improbable. I did not come to be snatched out of overdrive, even if you have a war on. This is a Med Ship!"
The slightly blurred voice said as heavily as before:
"This is a war, yes. We expected you. We wish you to take our final warning to Canis III. Follow us to our base and you will be briefed."
Calhoun said tartly:
"Suppose you tow me! When you dragged me out of overdrive you played the devil with my power!"
Murgatroyd said, "Chee?" and tried to stand on his hind legs to look at the screen. Calhoun brushed him away. When acknowledgment came from the unseen other ship, and the curious cushiony drag of the towing began to be felt, he cut off the microphone to the lightbeam. Then he said severely to Murgatroyd:
"What I said was not quite true, Murgatroyd. But there is a war on. To be a neutral I have to appear impressively helpless. That is what neutrality means."
But he was far from easy in his mind. Wars between worlds were flatly impossible. The facts of space travel made them unthinkable.
Yet there seemed to be a war. Something was happening, anyhow, which was contrary to all the facts of life in modern times. And Calhoun was involved in it. It demanded that he immediately change all his opinions and all his ideas of what he might have to do. The Med Service could not take sides in a war, of course. It had no right to help one side or the other. Its unalterable function was to prevent the needless death of human beings. So it could not help one combatant to victory. On the other hand it could not merely stand by, tending the wounded, and by alleviating individual catastrophes allow their numbers to mount.
"This," said Calhoun, "is the devil!"
"Chee!" said Murgatroyd.
The Med Ship was being towed. Calhoun had asked for it and it was being done. There should have been no way to tow him short of a physical linkage between ships. There were force-fields which could perform that function—landing grids used them constantly—but ships did not mount them—not ordinary ships, anyhow. That fact bothered Calhoun.
"Somebody's gone to a lot of trouble," he said, scowling, "as if wars were going back into fashion and somebody was getting set to fight them. Who's got us, anyhow?"
The request for Med Service aid had come from Phaedra II. But the military action—if any—had been stated to be due on Canis III. The flaming nearby sun and its family of planets was the Canis solar system. The odds were, therefore, that he'd been snatched out of overdrive by the Phaedrian fleet. He'd been expected. They'd ordered him not to use the spacephone. The local forces wouldn't care if the planet overheard. The invaders might. Unless there were two space fleets in emptiness, jockeying for position for a battle in the void. But that was preposterous. There could be no battles in unstressed space where any ship could flick into overdrive flight in the fraction of a second!
"Murgatroyd," said Calhoun querulously, "this is all wrong! I can't make head or tail or anything! And I've got a feeling that there is something considerably more wrong than I can figure out. At a guess, it's probably a Phaedrian vessel that's hooked on to us. They didn't seem surprised when I said who I was. But—"
He checked his instrument board. He examined the screens. There were planets of the yellow sun, which now was nearly dead ahead. Calhoun saw an almost infinitely thin crescent, and knew that it was the sunward world toward which he was being towed. Actually, he didn't need a tow. He'd asked for it for no particular reason except to put whoever had stopped him in the wrong. To injure a Med Ship would be improper even in war—especially in war.
His eyes went back to the external-field dial. There was a force-field gripping the ship. It was of the type used by landing grids—a type impractical for use on shipboard. A grid to generate such a force-field had to have one foot of diameter for roughly every ten miles of range. A ship to have the range of his captor would have to be as big as a planetary landing grid. And no planetary landing grid could handle it.
Then Calhoun's eyes popped open and his jaw dropped.
"Murgatroyd!" he said, appalled. "Confound them, it's true! They've found a way to fight!"
Wars had not been fought for many hundreds of years, and there was no need for them now. Calhoun had only lately been studying the records of warfare in all its aspects and consequences, and as a medical man he felt outraged. Organized slaughter did not seem a sane process for arriving at political conclusions. The whole galactic culture was based upon the happy conviction that wars could never happen again. If it was possible, they probably would. Calhoun knew humanity well enough to be sure of that.
"Chee?" said Murgatroyd inquiringly.
"You're lucky to be a tormal!" Calhoun told him. "You never have to feel ashamed of your kind."
The background information he had about warfare in general made him feel skeptical in advance about the information he would presently be given. It would be what used to be called propaganda, given him under the name of briefing. It would agree with him that wars in general were horrible, but it would most plausibly point out—with deep regret—that this particular war, fought by this particular side, was both admirable and justified.
"Which," said Calhoun darkly, "I wouldn't believe even if it were true!"
II
"Information secured from others is invariably inaccurate in some fashion. A complete and reasoned statement of a series of events is almost necessarily trimmed and distorted and edited, or it would not appear reasonable and complete. Truly factual accounts of any series of happenings will, if honest, contain inconsistent or irrational elements. Reality is far too complex to be reduced to simple statements without much suppression of fact . . ."
Manual, Interstellar Medical Service. P. 25.
He was able to verify his guess about the means by which interstellar war had become practical, when the Med Ship was landed. Normally, a landing grid was a gigantic, squat structure of steel girders, half a mile high and a full mile in diameter. It rested upon bedrock, was cemented into unbreakable union with the substance of its planet, and tapped the ionosphere for power. When the Med Ship reached the abysmal darkness of the nearest planet's shadow, there were long, long pauses in which it hung apparently motionless in space. There were occasional vast swingings, as if something reached out and made sure where it was. And Calhoun made use of his nearest-object indicator and observed that something very huge fumbled about and presently became stationary in emptiness, and then moved swiftly and assuredly down into the blackness which was the planet's night-side. When it and the planetary surface were one, the Med Ship began its swift descent in the grip of landing grid-type force-fields.