Calhoun's mouth dropped open. A Med Ship was welcome everywhere, these days. The Interstellar Medical Service was one of those over-worked, understaffed, kicked-around organizations that are everywhere taken for granted. Like breathable air, nobody thought to be grateful for it, but nobody was suspicious of it, either.
The suspicion and the weird coordinates and the ribbon in space combined to give Calhoun a highly improbable suspicion. He looked forward with great interest to this landing. He had not been ordered to land here, but he suspected that a Med Ship landing was a long, long time overdue.
"I forgot to take star-pictures," he told Murgatroyd, "but a ribbon like this would have been talked about if it had been reported before. I doubt star-pictures would do us any good. The odds are that our only chance to find out where we are is to ask." Then he shrugged his shoulders. "Anyhow this won't be routine!"
"Chee!" agreed Murgatroyd profoundly.
II
"An unsolvable but urgent problem may produce in a society, as in an individual, an uncontrollable emotional tantrum, an emotional denial of the problem's existence, or purposeful research for a solution. In olden days, the first reaction produced mass-tantrums then called "wars." The second produced dogmatic ideologies. The third produced modern civilization. All three reactions still appear in individuals. If the first two should return to societies, as such . . ."
The Practice of Thinking—Fitzgerald
The descent, at least, was not routine. It was nerve-racking. The force field from the planet's giant steel landing grid reached out into space and fumbled for the Med Ship. That was clumsily done. When it found the ship, it locked on, awkwardly. The rest was worse. Whoever handled the controls, aground, was hopelessly inept. Once the Med Ship's hull-temperature began to climb, and Calhoun had to throw on the space-phone and yelp for caution. He did not see as much of the nearing planet as he'd have liked.
At fifty miles of height, the last trace of blue sea vanished around the bulge of the world. At twenty miles, the mountain chains were clearly visible, with their tortured, winding ice rivers which were glaciers. At this height three patches of green were visible from aloft. One, directly below, was little more than a mile in diameter and the landing grid was its center and almost its circumference. Another was streaky and long, and there seemed to be heavy mist boiling about it and above it. The third was roughly triangular. They were many miles apart. Two of them vanished behind mountains as the ship descended.
There were no cities in view. There were no highways. This was an ice world with bare ground and open water at its equator only. The spaceport was placed in a snow ringed polar valley.
Near landing, Calhoun strapped in because of the awkwardness with which the ship was lowered. He took Murgatroyd on his lap. The small craft bounced and wabbled as unskilled hands let it down. Presently, Calhoun saw the angular girders of the landing grid's latticed top rise past the opened ports. Seconds later, the Med Ship bumped and slid and bounced heart-stoppingly. Then it struck ground with a violent jolt.
Calhoun got his breath back as the ship creaked and adjusted itself to rest on its landing-fins, after some months in space.
"Now," said the voice in the space-phone speaker—but it sounded as if it were trying to conceal relief—"now stay in your ship. Our weapons are bearing on you. You may not come out until we've decided what to do about you."
Calhoun raised his eyebrows. This was very unusual indeed. He glanced at the external-field indicator. The landing-grid field was off. So the operator bluffed. In case of need Calhoun could blast off on emergency rockets and probably escape close-range weapons anyhow—if there were any—and he could certainly get around the bulge of the world before the amateur at the grid's controls could lock on to him again.
"Take your time," he said with irony. "I'll twiddle my fingers. I've nothing better to do!"
He freed himself from his chair and went to a port to see. He regarded the landscape about him with something like disbelief.
The landing grid itself was a full mile across and half as high. It was a vast, circular frame of steel beams reaching heavenward, with the curiously curving copper cables strung as they had to be to create the highly special force field which made space transportation practical. Normally, such gigantic structures rose in the centers of spaceport cities. They drew upon the planet's ionosphere for power to lift and land cargo ships from the stars, and between-times they supplied energy for manufactures and the operation of cities. They were built, necessarily, upon stable bed-rock formations, and for convenience were usually located where the cargoes to be shipped would require least surface transportation.
But here, there was no city. There was perhaps a thousand acres of greenness, a mere vague rim around the outside of the grid. There was a control-room building to one side, of course. It was solidly made of stone, but there had been an agglomeration of lean-tos added to it with slanting walls and roofs of thin stratified rock. There were cattle grazing on the green grass. The center of the grid was a pasture!
Save for the clutter about the grid-control building there were no structures, no dwellings, no houses or homes anywhere in view. There was no longer even a highway leading to the grid. Calhoun threw on the outside microphones and there was no sound except a thin keening of wind in the steelwork overhead. But presently one of the cattle made a mournful bellowing sound.
Calhoun whistled as he went from one port to another.
"Murgatroyd," he said meditatively on his second round, "you observe—if you observe—one of the consequences of human error. I still don't know where I am, because I doubt that starplates have ever been made from this solar system, and I didn't take one for comparison anyhow. But I can tell you that this planet formerly had a habitability rating of something like oh point oh, meaning that if somebody wanted to live here it would be possible but it wouldn't be sensible. Although people did come here, and it was a mistake."
He stared at a human figure, far away. It was a woman, dressed in shapeless, badly draping garments. She moved toward a clump of dark-coated cattle and did something in their midst.
"The mistake looks pretty evident to me," added Calhoun. "I see some possibilities I don't like at all. There is such a thing as an isolation syndrome, Murgatroyd. A syndrome is a complex of pathological symptoms which occur together as a result of some morbid condition. To us humans, isolation is morbid. You help me to endure it, Murgatroyd, but I couldn't get along with only even your society—charming as it is—for but so long. A group of people can get along longer than a single man, but there is a limit for any small-sized group."
"Chee," said Murgatroyd.
"In fact," said Calhoun, frowning, "there's a specific health problem involved, which the Med Service recognizes. There can be partial immunity, but there can be some tricky variations. If we're up against a really typical case we have a job on hand. And how did these people get that dust ring out in space? They surely didn't hang it out themselves!"
He sat down and scowled at his thoughts. Presently, he rose again and once more surveyed the icy landscape. The curious green pasture about the landing grid was highly improbable. He saw glaciers overhanging this valley. They were giant ice rivers which should continue to flow and overwhelm this relatively sheltered spot. They didn't. Why not?