He moved to leave the laboratory again. A voice came out a loudspeaker, and he instantly searched for and found the microphone by which it could be answered. He flicked it off as his prisoner tried to scream commands into it.
"Haven't you found out yet?" asked the loudspeaker apprehensively. "Don't you know what's the matter with those men? There are two more missing on roll call. There's something like panic building up. The men are guessing that a native doctor's spreading a plague among us!"
Calhoun shrugged. The voice came from outside. It had been an authoritative voice, not long since. Now it was a badly worried one. He did not answer its questions. It repeated them. It waited and asked again. It almost pleaded for a reply. With the microphone off, however, the authoritative voice, which must be that of the commander of the butchers, grew resentful at being ignored. It faded out, trembling, shaking a little, but whether with hatred or terror he could not be sure. It could be either.
"Your popularity's diminishing," said Calhoun. He put down the microphone, safely off. He noted a spacephone receiver alongside the speaker-amplifier. "Hm," he said. "Suspicious, eh? You didn't even trust the skipper. Had to do your own receiving. Typical!"
The trussed-up, wizened man spoke suddenly with absolute cold precision.
"What do you want?" he demanded.
"Information," said Calhoun.
"For yourself? What do you want? I can give it to you!" said the mouth beneath the half-mad dark eyes. "I can give you anything you can imagine! I can give you riches more than you can dream!"
Calhoun sat negligently on the arm of a chair.
"I'll listen," he observed. "But apparently you're only technical director of the operation here. It's not a very big operation. You had only a thousand people to kill. You're acting under orders. How could you give me anything important?"
"This—" his prisoner cursed. "This is a test—an experiment! Let me go, let it be finished, and I can give you a world to rule. I'll make you king of a planet! You'll have millions of slaves! You'll have women by the hundreds or thousands if you choose!"
Calhoun said detachedly, "You wouldn't expect me to believe that without the details."
The dark eyes flamed. Then, with an effort of will that was as violent as his rage had been, the small bound figure brought itself to composure. It was not calmness. Fury surged up when he attempted a persuasive gesture and could not move. Frustration maddened him to panting for breath. But between such moments, he talked with a terrifying plausibility, with a precision of detail that showed a scheme worked out with infinite care. It was his scheme. He had convinced a planetary government to try it. He was necessary to it. He would have power to spare and he could bribe Calhoun with everything that was rich and alluring and apparently irresistible. He set persuasively to work to bribe him.
It was quite horrible.
His captive went on. His tone wheedled, and was strident, and in turn was utterly convincing and remarkably persuasive.
Once Maris III was occupied by colonists from the world that had sent the plague, nothing could be done. Dettra Two could never land its people in the city. They would die. Only the usurping population could survive there. For all time to come the world of Maris III must belong to the folk who had planted it with death. The permanent colonists here must be immunized like the members of the invading party themselves.
"Who," said Calhoun, "are not as happy as they used to be."
His captive licked his lips and went on, his eyes deadly and his tone reasonable and seductive and remarkably hypnotic.
But Maris III was only a test. Once the process was proved here, there were other worlds to be taken over. Not only new colony-worlds like this. Old and established worlds would find themselves attacked by plagues their doctors would be helpless to combat. Then there would come ships from the world that had tried out its technique on Maris III. The ships would end the plagues. They would prove it. They would offer to sell life to all the citizens of the dying worlds—at a price.
"Unprofessional," said Calhoun, "but probably profitable."
The price, in effect, would be submission. It would amount to slavery. Those who would not accept the bargain would die.
"Of course," said Calhoun, "they might try to back out of such a bargain later."
His captive smiled a thin-lipped smile, while his eyes did not change at all. He explained convincingly that if there was a revolt, it would not matter. The countermeasure to a new defiance would always be a new plague. There were many plagues ready to use. They would build an interstellar empire in which rebellion would be a form of suicide. No world once taken over could ever free itself. No world once chosen could possibly resist. There would be worlds by tens and scores and hundreds to be ruled by men like Calhoun. He would rate a planet-kingdom of his own. His Med Service training entitled him to an empire! He would be absolute ruler and absolute master of millions of abject slaves who must please his most trivial whim or die!
"An objection," said Calhoun. "You haven't mentioned the Med Service. I don't think it would take kindly to such a system of planetary conquest."
Here was the highest test of the prisoner's ability to sway and persuade and convince and almost to hypnotize. He had a matter of minutes to make the Med Service ridiculous, and to point out the defenselessness of its Sector Headquarters, and then—without arousing ancient prejudices—to make it seem natural and inevitable and almost humorous that Med Service Sector Headquarters would receive special precautionary fusion-bomb treatment as soon as the Maris III task was finished. Calhoun stirred. His prisoner spoke even more urgently, more desperately. He pictured worlds on which every living being would be Calhoun's slave—
"That'll do," said Calhoun. "I've got the information I wanted."
"Then release me," said his prisoner eagerly. And then his burning eyes read Calhoun's no-longer-guarded expression.
"You accept," he cried fiercely. "You accept! You can't refuse! You can't!"
"Of course I can," said Calhoun annoyedly. "You've no idea! I wouldn't want a million slaves, or even one. I'm reasonably sane! And such a crazy scheme couldn't work anyhow. Sheer probability would throw in so many unfavorable chance happenings that it would be bound to go smash. I'm proof of it. I'm an unfavorable chance happening right here, the very first time you tried the beastly business."
His prisoner tried to talk more persuasively still. He tried to be more tempting still. He tried, but his throat clicked. He struggled to be more convincing and more alluring than it was possible to be. Suddenly he shrieked curses at Calhoun. They were horrible to listen to. He screamed—
Calhoun raised the paint-gun, his features twisted and wry. He sent a single small vortex ring.
In the sudden silence that fell, a tiny, tinny voice sounded from the spacephone receiver at one side of the laboratory.
"Calling ground," said a voice faintly. "Ship from home with passengers calling ground on Maris III. Calling ground . . ."
Calhoun jerked his head about and listened to the reiterated call. Then he bent to the necessary next thing to be done with his prisoner.
"Calling ground," said the voice patiently. "We do not read you. If you are answering, we do not pick up your signal. We will go in orbit and continue to call. Calling ground . . ."
Calhoun turned it off. Murgatroyd said inquiringly, "Chee!"
"That's a deadline," said Calhoun grimly. "For us. It's a shipload of happy, immunized colonists, ready to land here. We blew the landing grid, Murgatroyd, when they tried to butter us over the inside of the Med Ship. Apparently we blew their spacephone at the same time. So the spacephone in this ship here is the only one working. And we have too much sense to answer that call. But it gives us a deadline, just the same. If they still don't raise their friends, the ship may stay in orbit, but somebody'll come down in a lifeboat to find out what's wrong. And that will shoot the works! We'll have a passenger ship full of enthusiasts ready to land and finish the mopping-up business—and us! There's just you and me, Murgatroyd, to take care of the situation. Let's get at it!"