Now Calhoun had raised the pressure-control. The control called for a pressure of twenty pounds to the square inch instead of fourteen point seven. The tanks poured out vast volumes of air from the reserve-tanks. The pressure inside the ship went up. The sulfur smoke being pumped in the ship turned cold. An icy blast poured out on the sweating men atop the log. The burning sulfur itself was blown about . . .
The men on the log went down. The tumult of outcries outside the Med Ship was a frenzied rage.
Calhoun restored the pressure-control to normal. Elna shivered. The air in the ship was cold.
"What—what happens now?" she asked forlornly. "If you can't lift off . . ."
"I'm waiting for the spaceboat that went to Lanke," said Calhoun. "He's going to come here. Object, to take over the Med Ship."
The ceiling G.C. speaker rasped: "Med Ship! You think you're smart, eh? Come out of that ship and leave the air-lock open or we'll kill you!"
Calhoun said politely, "Hadn't we better talk it over? I really should get to Med Headquarters . . ."
"We've a cannon," said the harsh voice. "If we have to use it—we can rebuild what it breaks. Come out!"
Calhoun did not reply. Instead, he carefully inspected the dials and the switches of the control-board. Rob said savagely, "Here comes the boat! If they fire an explosive shell into us, it'll destroy us!"
"And the Med Ship too," said Calhoun encouragingly. "Which is what you want. But they're not used to gunnery near a planet, which makes straight-line trajectories into parabolas."
He saw the lifeboat, patches on patches, dents and lumps in its hull, the very picture of makeshifts piled on each other to the point of lunacy. It landed, on what must have been a flat place on a mountain-flank. The voice came again, "Come out, leaving the air-lock open, or we kill you!"
Rob said as if reluctantly, "You should let Elna go out before they kill us."
Calhoun said, "I was just waiting for that ship. It really shouldn't go traveling about. Nobody should leave Delhi but me."
"But you're mired! You're stuck here. Your rockets can't lift you."
"I'm not counting on rocket thrust," said Calhoun cheerfully. "I'm going to use steam."
He pressed a button. As had happened once before in this place, a slender blue-white flame appeared under the stern-most part of the Med Ship's hull. It was the emergency rocket, by which the ship had landed. Now the ship was held fast by mud. It would have required a pull or push of many times the Med Ship's weight to break the suction of the mud. The rockets, as rockets, could not conceivably have pushed the spacecraft clear.
But the rocket flame bored deep down into the ground. It vaporized the water beneath it. It volatilized the ground. For eight feet down in the valley bottom's water-saturated soil, the flame bored its way. Steam pressure developed. Steam bubbles of enormous size came up. Steam broke surfaces, heaving up masses of semi-solid valley bottom and escaping at the jagged edges of the cracks between masses. The Med Ship ceased to rest upon an adhesive mass of muck, packed over the feet at the bottom of the landing-fins. The Med Ship actually floated on a mixture of solidities and semi-solidities and steam. It wasn't using the propulsive power of its rockets, at all. It used their steam-generating capacity.
She shot upward before the spaceboat could fire a shell at her. She went up three thousand feet before Calhoun cut down on the rocket power. Then he peered carefully, tilted the ship and let it drop. The valley bottom seemed to leap up. The spaceboat spouted rocket flame. Calhoun dashed at it, seeming to intend a crashing collision in mid-air. He missed it by feet. He swooped and circled and dashed in at it again. The spaceboat dodged frantically.
"I'm doing this in atmosphere," said Calhoun, with an air of apology, "because they made a leak in the hull. I have to take care of the spaceboat. It shouldn't leave Delhi."
The spaceboat fired a cannon-shell. It went completely wild. Calhoun swept in, flipped the Med Ship end for end, and his rocket flame would have cut the spaceboat in two had he swung one of his controls the quarter of an inch. He didn't. Instead he flung the Med Ship about until it was borne in upon the crew of the spaceboat. They had run up against a professional in spacecraft handling. He literally drove the spaceboat down and down and down—and he could have destroyed it a dozen times over—until at the last it made a panicky landing and figures leaped out of it and fled away.
Calhoun made the Med Ship hover above it, fifty feet high, with that deadly star-temperature flame of the rockets drilling through the hull, through the patches, and into the interior.
It was only when flames burst out of cracks and crevices all over the grounded freakish spacecraft that he lifted the Med Ship and headed away over the horizon.
He landed once more on Delhi, some hundreds of miles away on the single continent this planet owned. He was very tired, then. He ordered Rob and Elna out of his ship.
"Nobody should leave Delhi but me," he repeated politely. "So you get out. There'll be a hospital ship here within a week, two at the outside. Are you two going to be married?"
Rob said with dignity, "Not unless the plague is defeated and we can go where we please, not if our children would have to stay on Delhi and gradually become savages."
"I'll send you a wedding present by the hospital ship," promised Calhoun. "You did me a great favor. Thanks."
He closed the air-lock. He looked at a dial. The reserve-tanks of the Med Ship had been emptied, in blowing sulfur smoke out of the single puncture in its hull. He had been pumping them up to normal reserve pressure again, and this was Delhi air. Anybody who got the plague had only to stay in Delhi air and he would be cured. However, there was work for the Med Service to do to arrange that he not relapse when he went out of Delhi air again, nor give the plague to anybody else. There'd be no difficulty about that. The Med Service had solved much more difficult problems.
Calhoun sealed the hull-puncture with a quick-setting plastic. He sealed off the compartment whose wall had been pierced. He went down to the control-room. He blinked as he set the rockets to roaring again and the Med Ship climbed for the sky.
An hour later he was intolerably tired. He aimed the Med Ship for that far-off small star-cluster which was its home. With extra care, because of his weariness, he verified what he'd done. Then he said, "Overdrive coming, Murgatroyd. Five—four—three—two—one."
There was a revolting dizziness and an appalling nausea and then the feeling of a spinning drop to nowhere. Then the Med Ship was in overdrive. It felt solid as a rock. There was no sound but the background tape producing almost inaudible noises of traffic, and rain, and surf, and music, and human voices. There was even faint laughter.
Calhoun yawned.
"Murgatroyd?"
"Chee-chee!" said Murgatroyd shrilly. "Chee?"
"Take over the ship," commanded Calhoun. "If any emergencies turn up, you take care of them. I'm going to bed!"
And he did.