"Yes," said Kim. He moved away. Then he stopped. "What about your prisoners? They're knocked out now. What about them?"
Calhoun shrugged.
"Oh, we'll let them sleep until we finish repairing the landing grid. I think I can be helpful with that."
"Every one of them is a murderer," growled the broad-bearded man.
"True," agreed Calhoun. "But lynching is bad business. It even offers the possibility of unfavorable chance consequences. Let's take care of the shipload of colonists first."
So they did. It was odd how they could take a sort of pleasure in the enactment of imagined disaster even greater than they had suffered. Their eyes gleamed happily as they went about their task.
The passenger ship went away. It did not have a pleasant journey. When it landed, its passengers burst tumultuously out of the spaceport to tell their story. Their home world went into a panic which was the more uncontrollable because the people had been very carefully told how deadly the tamed plagues would be to the inhabitants of worlds that they might want to take over. But now they believed the tamed plagues had turned upon them.
The deaths, especially among members of the ruling class, were approximately equal in number to those a deadly pandemic would have caused.
But back on Maris III things moved smoothly. Rather more than eighty people, altogether, were found and treated and ultimately helped with the matter of the slumbering invaders. That was almost a labor of love. Certainly it gave great satisfaction. The landing grid was back in operation two days after the passenger ship left. They took the landed spaceship and smashed its drive and communicators, and they wrecked its Duhanne cells. They took out the breech-plugs of the rockets and dumped the rocket fuel, saving just enough for the little Med Ship. Naturally, they removed the lifeboats.
And then they revived the unconscious butcher-invaders and put them, one by one, into the spacecraft in which they had come. That craft was now a hulk. It could not drive or use rockets or even signal. Its vision screens were blind; the Med Ship used some of them.
And then they used the landing grid—Calhoun checking the figures—and they put their prisoners up in orbit to await the arrival of proper authority. They could feed themselves, but any attempt at escape would be pure and simple suicide. They could not attempt to escape.
"And now," said Calhoun, when the planet was clean of strangers again, "now I'll bring my ship to the grid. We'll recharge my Duhanne cells and replace my vision screens. I can make it here on rockets, but it's a long way to headquarters. So I'll report, and a field team will come here and check out the planet, artificial plagues included. They'll arrange, somehow, to take care of the prisoners up in orbit. That's not my affair. Maybe Dettra Two would like to have them. In the meantime, they can search their consciences."
Kim said, frowning, "You put something over on us! You kept us so busy we forgot one man. You said there'd be a microbiologist in the invaders' party. You said he'd probably be the man who had invented the plague. And he's up there in orbit with the rest—he'll get no more than they get! You put something over on us. He deserves some special treatment!"
Calhoun said very evenly, "Revenge is always apt to have unfavorable chance consequences. Let him alone. You've no right to punish him. You've only a right to punish a child to correct it, or to punish a man to deter others from doing what he's done. Do you expect to correct the kind of man who'd invent the plague that flourished here, and meant to use it for the making of an empire of slaves? Do you think others need to be deterred from trying the same thing?"
Kim said thickly, "But he's a murderer! All the murders were his! He deserves—"
"Condign punishment?" asked Calhoun sharply. "You've no right to administer it. Anyhow, think what he's up against!"
"He's—he's . . ." Kim's face changed. "He's up there in orbit, hopeless, with his butchers all around him and blaming him for the fix they're in. They've nothing to do but hate him. Nothing . . ."
"You didn't arrange that situation," said Calhoun coldly. "He did. You simply put prisoners in a safe place because it would be impractical to guard them, otherwise. I suggest you forget him."
Kim looked sickish. He shook his head to clear it. He tried to thrust the man who'd planned pure horror out of his mind. He said slowly, "I wish we could do something for you."
"Put up a statue," said Calhoun dryly, "and in twenty years nobody will know what it was for. You and Helen are going to be married, aren't you?" When Kim nodded, Calhoun said, "In course of time, if you remember and think it worthwhile, you may inflict a child with my name. That child will wonder why, and ask, and so my memory will be kept green for a full generation."
"Longer than that," insisted Kim. "You'll never be forgotten here!"
Calhoun grinned at him.
Three days later, which was six days longer than he'd expected to be aground on Maris III, the landing grid heaved the little Med Ship out to space. The beautiful, nearly empty city dwindled as the grid field took the tiny spacecraft out to five planetary diameters and there released it. And Calhoun spun the Med Ship about and oriented it carefully for that place in the Cetis cluster where Med Service Headquarters was. He threw the overdrive switch.
The universe reeled. Calhoun's stomach seemed to turn over twice, and he had a sickish feeling of spiraling dizzily in what was somehow a cone. He swallowed. Murgatroyd made gulping noises. There was no longer a universe perceptible about the ship. There was dead silence. Then those small random noises began which have to be provided if a man is not to crack up in the dead stillness of a ship traveling at thirty times the speed of light.
Then there was nothing more to do. In overdrive travel there is never anything to do but pass the time away.
Murgatroyd took his right-hand whiskers in his right paw and licked them elaborately. He did the same to his left-hand whiskers. He contemplated the cabin, deciding upon a soft place in which to go to sleep.
"Murgatroyd," said Calhoun severely, "I have to have an argument with you. You imitate us humans too much! Kim Walpole caught you prowling around with an injector, starting to give our prisoners another shot of polysulfate. It might have killed them! Personally, I think it would have been a good idea, but in a medical man it would have been most unethical. We professional men have to curb our impulses! Understand?"
"Chee!" said Murgatroyd. He curled up and wrapped his tail meticulously about his nose, preparing to doze.
Calhoun settled himself comfortably in his bunk. He picked up a book. It was Fitzgerald on Probability and Human Conduct.
He began to read as the ship went on through emptiness.