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

side. Murgatroyd was disturbed. There should be people here! They should welcome
Calhoun and admire him—Murgatroyd—and he should be a social lion with all the
sweets he could eat and all the coffee he could put into his expandable belly. But nothing
happened. Nothing at all.
"Chee?" he asked anxiously. "Chee-chee?"
"They've gone away," growled Calhoun. "They probably left in ground-cars. There's
not a one in sight."
There wasn't. Calhoun could look out through the grid foundations and see long,
sunlit, and absolutely empty streets. He arrived at the space-port building. There was—
there had been—a green space about the base of the structure. There was not a living
plant left. Leaves were wilted and limp. There was almost a jelly of collapsed stems and
blossoms, of dark olive-green. The plants were dead, but not long enough to have dried
up. They might have wilted two days before. Possibly three.
Calhoun went in the building. The space-port log lay open on a desk. It recorded the
arrival of freight to be shipped away—undoubtedly—on the Candida now uneasily in
orbit somewhere aloft. There was no sign of disorder. It was exactly as if the people here
had walked out to look at something interesting, and hadn't come back.
Calhoun trudged out of the space-port and to the streets and buildings of the city
proper. It was incredible! Doors were opened or unlocked. Merchandise in the shops lay
on display, exactly as it had been spread out to interest customers. There was no sign of
confusion anywhere. Even in a restaurant there were dishes and flatware on the tables.
The food in the plates was stale, as if three days old, but it hadn't yet begun to spoil. The
appearance of everything was as if people at their meals had simply, at some signal,
gotten up and walked out without any panic or disturbance.
Calhoun made a wry face. He'd remembered something. Among the tales that had
been carried from Earth to the other worlds of the galaxy there was a completely
unimportant mystery-story which people still sometimes tried to write an ending to. It
was the story of an ancient sailing-ship called the Marie Celeste, which was found sailing
aimlessly in the middle of the ocean. There was food on the cabin table and the galley
stove was still warm, and there was no sign of any trouble, or terror, or disturbance which
might cause the ship to be abandoned. But there was not a living soul on board. Nobody
had ever been able to contrive a believable explanation.
"Only," said Calhoun to Murgatroyd, "this is on a larger scale. The people of this city
walked out about three days ago, and didn't come back. Maybe all the people on the
planet did the same, since there's not a communicator in operation anywhere. To make
the understatement of the century, Murgatroyd, I don't like this! I don't like it a bit!"
 II
On the way back to the Med Ship, Calhoun stopped at another place where, on a
grass-growing planet, there would have been green sward. There were Earth-type trees,
and some native ones, and between them there should have been a lawn. The trees were
thriving, but the ground-cover plants were collapsed and rotting. Calhoun picked up a bit
of the semi-slime and smelled it. It had a faintly sour and astringent smell, the same he'd
noticed when he opened the airlock door. He threw the stuff away and brushed off his
hands. Something had killed the ground-cover plants which had the habit of killing Earth-
type grass when planted here.
He listened. Everywhere that humans live, there are insects and birds and other tiny
creatures which are essential parts of the ecological system to which the human race is
adjusted. They have to be carried to and established upon every new world that mankind
hopes to occupy. But there was no sound of such living creatures here. It was probable
that the bellowing roar of the Med Ship's emergency rockets was the only real noise the