There was only one chance. Calhoun threw the spacephone switch. Instantly a voice came from the speaker.
" . . . calling Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty! Phaedra fleet calling Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty! Calling—" It went on interminably. It was a very long way off, if it took so long for Calhoun's answer to be heard. But the call-formula broke off. "Med Ship! Our doctors want to know the trouble on Canis! Can we help? We've hospital ships equipped and ready!"
"The question," said Calhoun steadily, "is whether I can make a formula-and-structure identification, and whether you can synthesize what I identify. How's your lab? How are you supplied with biological crudes?"
He waited. By the interval between his answer and a reply to it, the ship he'd communicated with was some five million miles or more away. But it was still not as far as the next outward planet where the Phaedrian fleet was based.
While he waited for his answer, Calhoun heard murmurings. They would come from the control building at the side of the grid. The loutish, suspicious gang there was listening. Calhoun had threatened to wreck the grid if they tried anything on the Med Ship—but he could do nothing unless they tried to use a force-field. They listened in, muttering among themselves.
A long time later the voice from space came back. The fleet of the older generation of Phaedra was grounded, save for observation ships like the one speaking. The fleet had full biological equipment for any emergency. It could synthesize any desired compound up to— The degree of complexity and the classification was satisfactory.
"Day before yesterday," said Calhoun, "when you had me aground on Canis IV, your leader Walker said your children on this planet were destroying your grandchildren. He didn't say how. But the process is well under way—only the whole population will probably go with them. Most of the population, anyhow. I'm going to need those hospital ships and your best biological chemists—I hope! Get them started this way—fast! I'll try to make a deal for at least the hospital ships to be allowed to land. Over."
He did not flick off the spacephone. He listened. And a bitter, envenomed voice came from nearby:
"Sure! Sure! We'll let 'em land ships they say are hospital ships, loaded down with men and guns! We'll land 'em ourselves, we will!"
There was a click. The spacephone in the control building was turned off.
Calhoun turned back to the sleeping Murgatroyd. There was a movement about the grid-control building. Sleek, glistening ground-cars hurtled away—two of them. Calhoun turned then to the planetary communicator. It could break in on any wave-length used for radio communication under a planet's Heaviside roof. He had to get in touch with Walker or some other of the first-landed colonists. They were still embittered against their home world, but they must be beginning to realize that Calhoun had told the truth about the youngest children. They'd find sickness if they looked for it.
But the planetary communicator picked up nothing. No radiation wave-length was in use. There was no organized news service. The young people on Canis III were too self-centered to care about news. There were no entertainment programs. Only show-offs would want to broadcast, and show-offs would not make the apparatus.
So Calhoun could not communicate save by spacephone, with a range of millions of miles, and the ship's exterior loud-speakers, with a range of hundreds of feet. If he left the Med Ship, he wasn't likely to be able to fight his way back in. He couldn't find the younger Walker on foot, in any case, and he did not know anyone else to seek.
Besides, there was work to be done in the ship.
Before Murgatroyd waked, the two ground-cars had returned. At intervals, nearly a dozen other cars followed to the control building, hurtling across the grid's clear center with magnificent clouds of dust following them. They braked violently when they arrived. Youths piled out. Some of them yelled at the Med Ship and made threatening gestures. They swarmed into the building.
Murgatroyd said tentatively, "Chee?"
He was awake. Calhoun could have embraced him.
"Now we see what we see," he said grimly. "I hope you've done your stuff, Murgatroyd!"
Murgatroyd came obligingly to him, and Calhoun lifted him to the table he had ready. Calhoun extracted a quantity of what he hoped was a highly concentrated bacterial antagonist. He took thirty CCs in all. He clumped the red cells. He separated the serum. He diluted an infinitesimal bit of it and with a steady hand added it to a slide of the same cultures—living—on which Murgatroyd's dynamic immunity system had worked.
The cultures died immediately.
Calhoun had an antibody sample which could end the intolerable now-spreading disaster on the world of young people—if he could analyze it swiftly and accurately, and if the hospital ships from Phaedra could be landed, and if they could synthesize some highly complex antibody compounds, and if the inhabitants of Canis III would lay aside their hatred—
He heard a tapping sound on the Med Ship's hull. He looked at a screen. Two youths stood in the doorway of the control building, leisurely shooting at the Med Ship with sporting weapons.
Calhoun set to work. Sporting rifles were not apt to do much damage.
For an hour, while there was the occasional clanking of a missile against the ship's outer planking, he worked at the infinitely delicate job of separating serum from its antibody content. For another hour he tried to separate the antibody into fractions. Incredibly, it would not separate. It was one substance only.
There was a crackling sound and the whole ship shivered. The screen showed a cloud of smoke drifting away. The members of the grid-guard had detonated some explosive—intended for mining, most likely—against one of the landing-fins.
Calhoun swore. His call to the Phaedrian fleet was the cause. The grid-guard meant to allow no landing. He'd threatened to blow out their controls if they tried to use the grid on the Med Ship, but they wanted it ready for use as a weapon against the space fleet. They couldn't use it against him. He couldn't damage it unless they tried. They wanted him away.
He went back to his work. From time to time, annoyedly, he looked up at the outside. Presently a young-warrior group moved toward the ship, carrying something very heavy. A larger charge of explosive, perhaps.
He waited until they were within yards of the ship. He stabbed the emergency-rocket button. A thin, pencil-like rod of flame shot downward between the landing-fins. It was blue-white—the white of a sun's surface. For one instant it splashed out hungrily before it bored and melted a hole into the ground itself into which to flow. But in that instant it had ignited the covering of the burden the youths carried. They dropped it and fled. The pencil flame bored deeper and deeper into the ground. Clouds of smoke and steam arose.
There was a lurid flash. The burden that the young warriors had abandoned vanished in a flare that looked like a lightning bolt. The ship quivered from the detonation. A crater appeared where the explosive had been.
Calhoun cut off the emergency rocket, which had burned for ten seconds at one-quarter thrust.
Sunset came and night fell for the second time. He noticed, abruptly, that some of the ground-cars from about the control building went racing away. But they did not pass close to the Med Ship in their departure. He labored on. He'd spent nearly thirty hours making cultures from the specimens swabbed from children's throats, and injecting Murgatroyd, and waiting for his reaction, and then separating a tiny quantity of antibody—which would not total more than the dust from a butterfly's wing—from the serum he obtained.