"Murray Leinster - Med Ship" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

to their next two ports of call. Nowadays quarantine regulations were enforced very
strictly indeed.
"I'll try to find out what's the matter," said Calhoun.
"We've got a passenger," repeated the Candida aggrievedly, "who insists that we land
him by space-boat if we don't make a ship-landing. He says he has important business
aground."
Calhoun did not answer. The rights of passengers were extravagantly protected, these
days. To fail to deliver a passenger to his destination entitled him to punitive damages
which no space-line could afford. So the Med Ship would seem heaven-sent to the
Candida's skipper. Calhoun could relieve him of responsibility.
The telescope screen winked, and showed the surface of the planet a hundred
thousand miles away. Calhoun glanced at the image on the port screen and guided the
telescope to the space-port city—Maya City. He saw highways and blocks of buildings.
He saw the space-port and its landing-grid. He could see no motion, of course. He raised
the magnification. He raised it again. Still no motion. He upped the magnification until
the lattice-pattern of the telescope's amplifying crystal began to show. But at the ship's
distance from the planet, a ground-car would represent only the fortieth of a second of
arc. There was atmosphere, too, with thermals. Anything the size of a ground-car simply
couldn't be seen.
But the city showed quite clearly. Nothing massive had happened to it. No large-scale
physical disaster had occurred. It simply did not answer calls from space.
Calhoun flipped off the screen.
"I think," he said irritably into the communicator microphone, "I suspect I'll have to
make an emergency landing. It could be something as trivial as a power failure"—but he
knew that was wildly improbable—"or it could be—anything. I'll land on rockets and tell
you what I find."
The voice from the Candida said hopefully:
"Can you authorize us to refuse to land our passenger for his own protection? He's
raising the devil! He insists that his business demands that he be landed."
A word from Calhoun as a Med Service man would protect the space-liner from a
claim for damages. But Calhoun didn't like the look of things. He realized, distastefully,
that he might find practically anything down below. He might find that he had to
quarantine the planet and himself with it. In such a case he'd need the Candida to carry
word of the quarantine to other planets and get word to Med Service sector headquarters.
 "We've lost a lot of time," insisted the Candida. "Can you authorize us—"
"Not yet," said Calhoun. "I'll tell you when I land."
"But—"
"I'm signing off for the moment," said Calhoun. "Stand by."
He headed the little ship downward and as it gathered velocity he went over the
briefing-sheets covering this particular world. He'd never touched ground here before.
His occupation, of course, was seeing to the dissemination of medical science as it
developed under the Med Service. The Service itself was neither political nor
administrative, but it was important. Every human-occupied world was supposed to have
a Med Ship visit at least once in four years. Such visits verified the state of public health.
Med Ship men like Calhoun offered advice on public-health problems. When something
out of the ordinary turned up, the Med Service had a staff of researchers who hadn't been
wholly baffled yet. There were great ships which could carry the ultimate in laboratory
equipment and specialized personnel to any place where they were needed. Not less than
a dozen inhabited worlds in this sector alone owed the survival of their populations to the
Med Service, and the number of those which couldn't have been colonized without Med