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

Murgatroyd again said, "Chee!"
Calhoun drove through vacant ways. It was somehow nerve-racking. He felt as if
someone should pop out and say, "Boo!" at any instant. He discovered an elevated
highway and a ramp leading up to it. It ran west to east. He drove eastward, watching
sharply for any sign of life. There was none.
He was nearly out of the city when he felt the chest-impact of a sonic boom, and then
heard a trailing-away growling sound which seemed to come from farther away as it died
out. It was the result of something traveling faster than sound, so that the noise it made
far away had to catch up with the sound it emitted nearby.
He stared up. He saw a parachute blossom as a bare speck against the blue. Then he
heard the even deeper-toned roaring of a supersonic craft climbing skyward. It could be a
spaceliner's lifeboat, descended into atmosphere and going out again. It was. It had left a
parachute behind and now went back to space to rendezvous with its parent ship.
"That," said Calhoun impatiently, "will be the Candida's passenger. If he was
insistent enough—"
He scowled. The Candida's voice had said its passenger demanded to be landed for
business reasons. And Calhoun had a prejudice against some kinds of business men who
would think their own affairs more important than anything else. Two standard years
before, he'd made a planetary health inspection on Texia II, in another galactic sector. It
was a llano planet and a single giant business enterprise. Illimitable prairies had been
sown with an Earth-type grass which destroyed the native ground-cover—the reverse of
the ground-cover situation here—and the entire planet was a monstrous range for beef-
cattle. Dotted about were gigantic slaughter-houses, and cattle in masses of tens of
thousands were shifted here and there by ground-induction fields which acted as fences.
Ultimately the cattle were driven by these same induction-fences to the slaughter-houses
and actually into the chutes where their throats were slit. Every imaginable fraction of a
credit profit was extracted from their carcasses, and Calhoun had found it appalling. He
was not sentimental about cattle, but the complete cold-bloodedness of the entire
operation sickened him. The same cold-bloodedness was practiced toward the human
employees who ran the place. Their living-quarters were sub-marginal. The air stank of
cattle-murder. Men worked for the Texia Company or they did not work. If they did not
work they did not eat. If they worked and ate—Calhoun could see nothing satisfying in
being alive on a world like that! His report to Med Service had been biting. He'd been
prejudiced against business men ever since.
But a parachute descended, blowing away from the city. It would land not too far
from the highway he followed. And it didn't occur to Calhoun not to help the unknown
chutist. He saw a small figure dangling below the chute. He slowed the ground-car. He
estimated where the parachute would land.
He was off the twelve-land highway and on a feeder-road when the chute was a
hundred feet high. He was racing across a field of olive-green plants—the field went all
the way to the horizon—when the parachute actually touched ground. There was a
considerable wind. The man in the harness bounced. He didn't know how to spill the air.
The chute dragged him.
Calhoun sped ahead, swerved, and ran into the chute. He stopped the car and the
chute stopped with it. He got out.
The man lay in a helpless tangle of cordage. He thrust unskillfully at it. When
Calhoun came up he said suspiciously:
"Have you a knife?"
Calhoun offered a knife, politely opening its blade. The man slashed at the cords. He
freed himself. There was an attaché-case lashed to his chute-harness. He cut at those