It landed in the center of a grid—but not a typical grid. This was more monstrous in size than any spaceport boasted. It was not squat, either, but as tall as it was wide. As the ship descended, he saw lights in a control-system cell, midway to the ground. It was amazing but obvious. The Med Ship's captors had built a landing grid which was itself a spaceship. It was a grid which could cross the void between stars. It could wage offensive war.
"It's infernally simple," Calhoun told Murgatroyd, distastefully. "The regular landing grid hooks onto something in space and pulls it to the ground. This thing hooks onto something on the ground and pushes itself out into space. It'll travel by Lawlor or overdrive, and when it gets somewhere it can lock onto any part of another world and pull itself down to that and stay anchored to it. Then it can land the fleet that traveled with it. It's partly a floating dry dock and partly a landing craft, and actually it's both. It's a ready-made spaceport anywhere it chooses to land. Which means that it's the deadliest weapon in the past thousand years!"
Murgatroyd climbed on his lap and blinked wisely at the screens. They showed the surroundings of the now-grounded Med Ship, standing on its tail. There were innumerable stars overhead. All about, there was the whiteness of snow. But there were lights. Ships at rest lay upon the icy ground.
"I suspect," growled Calhoun, "that I could make a dash on emergency rockets and get behind the horizon before they could catch me. But this is just a regular military base!"
He considered his recent studies of historic wars, of battles and massacres and looting and rapine. Even modern, civilized men would revert very swiftly to savagery once they had fought a battle. Enormities unthinkable at other times would occur promptly if men went back to barbarity. Such things might already be present in the minds of the crews of these spaceships.
"You and I, Murgatroyd," said Calhoun, "may be the only wholly rational men on this planet. And you aren't a man."
"Chee!" shrilled Murgatroyd. He seemed glad of it.
"But we have to survey the situation before we attempt anything noble and useless," Calhoun observed. "But still—what's that?"
He stared at a screen which showed lights on the ground moving toward the Med Ship. They were carried by men on foot, walking on the snow. As they grew nearer it appeared that there were also weapons in the group. They were curious, ugly instruments—like sporting rifles save that their bores were impossibly large. They would be— Calhoun searched his new store of information. They would be launchers of miniature rockets, capable of firing small missiles with shaped charges which could wreck the Med Ship easily.
Thirty yards off, they separated to surround the ship. A single man advanced.
"I'm going to let him in, Murgatroyd," observed Calhoun. "In war time, a man is expected to be polite to anybody with a weapon capable of blowing him up. It's one of the laws of war."
He opened both the inner and outer lock doors. The glow from inside the ship shone out on white, untrodden snow. Calhoun stood in the opening, observing that as his breath went out of the outer opening it turned to white mist.
"My name is Calhoun," he said curtly to the single dark figure still approaching. "Interstellar Medical Service. A neutral, a noncombatant, and at the moment very much annoyed by what has happened!"
A gray-bearded man with grim eyes advanced into the light from the opened port. He nodded.
"My name is Walker," he said, as curtly. "I suppose I'm the leader of this military expedition. At least, my son is the leader of the . . . ah . . . the enemy, which makes me the logical man to direct the attack upon them."
Calhoun did not quite believe his ears, but he pricked them up. A father and son on opposite sides would hardly have been trusted by either faction, as warfare used to be conducted. And certainly their relationship would hardly be a special qualification for leadership at any time.
He made a gesture of invitation, and the gray-bearded man climbed the ladder to the port. Somehow he did not lose the least trace of dignity in climbing. He stepped solidly into the air lock and on into the cabin of the ship.
"If I may, I'll close the lock-doors," said Calhoun, "if your men won't misinterpret the action. It's cold outside."
The sturdy, bearded man shrugged his cape-clad shoulders.
"They'll blast your ship if you try to take off," he said. "They're in the mood to blast something!"
With the same air of massive confidence, he moved to a seat. Murgatroyd regarded him suspiciously. He ignored the little animal.
"Well?" he said impatiently.
"I'm Med Service," said Calhoun. "I can prove it. I should be neutral in whatever is happening. But I was asked for by the planetary government of Phaedra. I think it likely that your ships come from Phaedra. Your grid ship, in particular, wouldn't be needed by the local citizens. How does the war go?"
The stocky man's eyes burned.
"Are you laughing at me?" he demanded.
"I've been three months in overdrive," Calhoun reminded him. "I haven't heard anything to laugh at in longer than that. No."
"The . . . our enemy," said Walker bitterly, "consider that they have won the war. But you may be able to make them realize that they have not, and they cannot. We have been foolishly patient, but we can't risk forbearance any longer. We mean to carry through to victory even if we arrive at cutting our own throats for a victory celebration. And that is not unlikely!"
Calhoun raised his eyebrows. But he nodded. His studies had told him that a war psychology was a highly emotional one.
"Our home planet Phaedra has to be evacuated," said Walker, very grimly indeed. "There are signs of instability in our sun. Five years since, we sent our older children to Canis III to build a world for all of us to move to. Our sun could burst at any time. It is certain to flare up some time—and soon! We sent our children because the place of danger was at home. We urged them to work feverishly. We sent the young women as well as the men at the beginning, so that if our planet did crisp and melt when our sun went off there would still be children of our children to live on. When we dared—when they could feed and shelter them—we sent younger boys and girls to safety, overburdening the new colony with mouths to feed, but at the least staying ourselves where the danger was! Later we sent even the small children, as the signs of an imminent cataclysm became more threatening."
Calhoun nodded again. There were not many novas in the galaxy in any one year, even among the millions of billions of stars it held. But there had been at least one colony which had had to be shifted because of evidence of solar instability. The job in that case was not complete when the flareup came. The evacuation of a world, though, would never be an easy task. The population had to be moved light-years of distance. Space-travel takes time, even at thirty times the speed of light. Where the time of disaster—the deadline for removal—could not be known exactly, the course adopted by Phaedra was logical. Young men and women were best sent off first. They could make new homes for themselves and for others to follow them. They could work harder and longer for the purpose than any other age-group—and they would best assure the permanent survival of somebody. The new colony would have to be a place of frantic, unresting labor, of feverish round-the-clock endeavor, because the time-scale for working was necessarily unknown but was extremely unlikely to be enough. When they could be burdened further, younger boys and girls would be shipped—old enough to help but not to pioneer. They could be sent to safety in a partly-built colony. Later smaller children could be sent, needing care from their older contemporaries. Only at long last would the adults leave their world for the new. They would stay where the danger was until all the younger ones were secure.