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

Service help was legion.
Calhoun re-read the briefing. Maya was one of four planets in this general area whose
life-systems seemed to have had a common origin, suggesting that the Arrhenius theory
of space-traveling spores was true in some limited sense. A genus of ground-cover plants
with motile stems and leaves, and cannibalistic tendencies, was considered strong
evidence of common origin.
The planet had been colonized for two centuries, now, and produced organic
compounds of great value from indigenous plants. They were used in textile manufacture.
There were no local endemic infections to which men were susceptible. A number of
human-use crops were grown. Cereals, grasses and grains, however, could not be grown
because of the native ground-cover motile-stem plants. All wheat and cereal food had to
be imported, and the fact severely limited Maya's population. There were about two
million on the planet, settled on a peninsula in the Yucatan Sea and a small area of
mainland. Public-health surveys had shown such-and-such, and such-and-such, and thus-
and-so. There was no mention of anything to account for the failure of the space-port to
respond to arrival-calls from space. Naturally!
The Med Ship drove on down. The planet revolved beneath it. As Maya's sunlit
hemisphere enlarged, Calhoun kept the telescope's field wide. He saw cities and vast
areas of cleared land where native plants were grown as raw materials for the organics'
manufacturies. He saw little true chlorophyll green, though. Mayan foliage tended to a
dark, olive-green.
At fifty miles he was sure that the city streets were empty even of ground-car traffic.
There was no spaceship aground in the landing-grid. There were no ground-cars in
motion on the splendid, multiple-lane highways.
At thirty miles altitude there were still no signals in the atmosphere, though when he
tried amplitude-modulation reception he picked up static. But there was no normally
modulated signal on the air at any frequency. At twenty miles, no. At fifteen miles
broadcast power was available, which proved that the landing-grid was working as usual,
tapping the upper atmosphere for electric charges to furnish power for all the planet's
needs.
From ten miles down to ground-touch, Calhoun was busy. It is not too difficult to
land a ship on rockets, with reasonably level ground to land on. But landing at a specific
spot is something else. Calhoun juggled the ship to descend inside the grid aground. His
rockets burned out pencil-thin holes through the clay and stone beneath the tarmac. He
cut them off.
Silence. Stillness. The Med Ship's outside microphones picked up small noises of
wind blowing over the city. There was no other sound at all.
—No. There was a singularly deliberate clicking sound, not loud and not fast. Perhaps
a click—a double-click—every two seconds. That was all.
Calhoun went into the airlock with Murgatroyd frisking a little in the expectation of
great social success among the people of this world. Calhoun cracked the outer airlock
door. He smelled something. It was a faintly sour, astringent odor that had the quality of
decay in it. But it was no kind of decay he recognized. Again stillness and silence. No
traffic-noise. Not even the almost inaudible murmur that every city has in all its ways at
all hours. The buildings looked as buildings should look at daybreak, except that the
doors and windows were open. It was somehow shocking.
A ruined city is dramatic. An abandoned city is pathetic. This was neither. It was
something new. It felt as if everybody had walked away, out of sight, within the past few
minutes.
Calhoun headed for the space-port building with Murgatroyd ambling puzzledly at his