The sum of all this was bewilderment. For example, the plague. He didn't have it anymore. It was a spontaneous recovery. If its victims recovered, why the terror on Lanke? Also, why were there two thousand people who wanted to leave Delhi, and somebody named Rob who didn't want anybody to leave—not even Calhoun?
He puzzled furiously while he waited for the girl to return. He heard movements. Somebody came up into the control-room from the storage decks below. He heard voices. If that was Rob, he'd reason to be uneasy. He called. A tall, broad young man of about his own age looked in the door.
"You're Rob," said Calhoun politely. His voice was stronger than he'd expected. "Would you mind telling me why you want to wreck my ship? I'm told that it's hopelessly bogged down in marshy ground now. Why add to the disaster by wrecking it?"
"Enough men," said the young man, with some grimness, "could dig it out. And then it could go away. That has to be made impossible!"
"But this is a Med Ship!" protested Calhoun. "It has a special status!"
"And this is Delhi," said Rob sternly. "There's a plague that's native to this planet. We who live here don't have it. If someone comes here with it, he recovers. But if we leave, we develop it, and if anyone from here landed on another world, he'd die of it with the people he took it to. So nobody must leave!"
Calhoun considered for a moment.
"But somebody has, not long ago. In fact, I caught the plague from him."
He couldn't have proved the connection of the dead man on Lanke with the freakish spaceship and that with Delhi, but he believed the connection was there. The man named Rob proved it by grinding his teeth.
"A crime!" he said fiercely. "And maybe we'll be bombed for it! It's another reason this ship has to be wrecked. We're quarantined. We have to be! The quarantine mustn't be broken!"
Calhoun considered again. There were people on Delhi, not less than two thousand of them, who would seize this ship if they could, take aboard as many as could crowd into it, and go on to other worlds where—obviously—they did not believe the plague would appear. On the other hand, there were people who knew that they'd die of the plague if they ever landed on any other world, and the plague would spread from them. The two views were contradictory, and Calhoun was for the moment in between them. He was sure the plague could be spread, though. He'd caught it. Those who wanted to risk everything to leave Delhi and escape whatever they hated here, they wouldn't listen to argument or listen to evidence. Such states of mind are standard with a certain proportion of any population.
Calhoun rubbed his nose reflectively. "This plague and this quarantine hasn't been reported to the Med Service," he observed. "When did it start, and why?"
"Delhi's been quarantined since the first ship landed," said Rob, grimly. "A ship came by and sent a lifeboat down to explore. It reported valuable minerals. The ship went back to Lanke—it hadn't landed—for equipment and supplies while the spaceboat explored further. They didn't know about the plague."
"It hadn't appeared?"
"No. The ship went back to Delhi and landed with machinery and supplies. They opened one mine. They built a settlement. They loaded the ship with ore. It went back to Lanke."
He paused dramatically. Calhoun said, "And . . ."
"It never got there! It simply never arrived. Months later an automatic distress-call was picked up from far out beyond the Lanke solar system. A ship went out to investigate. It was the ship from Delhi, floating where it had broken out of overdrive. There was no living creature aboard. Everybody was dead. It was the plague, but they didn't understand. They towed the ship to port and unloaded it; plague spread over the whole planet. They had to burn down cities to get rid of it! Delhi has been quarantined ever since, more than a hundred years."
"The Med Service should have been told," said Calhoun, annoyed. "Something would have been done about it!"
There was a sudden metallic clanging. It was a blow of something heavy against the Med Ship's exterior air-lock door. There was another blow, and another, and another. Rob listened for a moment and shrugged.
"Sometimes," he said, "there's somebody dropped to us by parachute. They have the plague. They recover. They tell us what other worlds are like, now. They don't often get reconciled to staying here."
The clanging continued. The girl came in from the control-room. She said in the same detached voice, "They're trying to break in with sledge-hammers. But some of them are cutting down trees and trimming them." She looked at Calhoun. "We can help you into the other room if you want to see."
Calhoun found himself struggling to rise. The tall man helped him. The girl said, "Rob has one thing wrong. Not all the people who're parachuted down to us have the plague!"
Rob made a deprecating sound. Calhoun began to move toward the cabin door. He was stronger than he'd thought. Once he was up, with the help of Rob on one side and the wall on the other, he made his way into the control-room. Rob helped him into the pilot's chair at the control-board.
He stared at the vision screens. The Aesclipus Twenty had landed in a marshy, meadowlike level space with mountains all around it. He could see the white walls of what had been a settlement on a mountain side, but it was plainly abandoned. There were only walls. Trees grew all the way down into the valley bottom, and men swung axes among them. As he looked, a tree toppled. Others had already been felled. He swung an outside pick-up to look down the Med Ship's side. A brawny, red-headed man was swinging a sledge-hammer against the sealing strip of the door. The impacts rang through the ship. Calhoun could see, too, where the flat parts of the landing-fins had pressed into the soggy soil. They'd sunk a good two yards below the surface and mud had flowed in over them. They were well buried.
"I'd guess," said Calhoun, "that they're cutting down the trees to make shears from which they can swing a battering ram. I doubt that a sledge-hammer can break the air-lock door. But a heavy enough log, swung hard enough, might do it. There are a lot of people here!"
The valley floor was black with human figures. There were at least two thousand of them, staring at the Med Ship, moving about restlessly, or standing in groups on the ground that might support a man, but not a spacecraft standing upright and heavy. Still others labored at the cutting and trimming of trees. There was somehow an air of tenseness, of impassioned feeling among the figures. Calhoun flipped on the outside microphones and the noise they made became audible. There was a growling, hurried murmur of voices. Sometimes, there were shouts. It was not a group of curiosity seekers, here to look at a spaceship come to ground where spaceships never came. It was a mob. It made the sound of a mob.
"Don't they know there's somebody alive in here?" asked Calhoun.
Rob said hesitantly, "I wanted to disable the ship. I thought it might take some time. So when we found they were coming we closed the air-lock and didn't answer the calls or their bangings on the hull. I think they've decided that somebody landed the ship and then died."
The girl said detachedly, "Not long ago they finishing mending a lifeboat that was wrecked here generations ago. They went to Lanke, and they came back. One man didn't return . . . They'd hidden their ship under water. Maybe he couldn't find it after he found what he was looking for. They may think that maybe he managed to steal this ship from the spaceport and has just gotten here. It could have been. He could have been wounded. He could have landed the ship and died."