This World Is Taboo | Page 9

You have
one ready, I'm sure."
The girl swallowed. Murgatroyd shook hands gravely. He said,

"Chee-chee!" in the shrillest of trebles and went back to his former
position.
"The story?" said Calhoun insistently.
"There--there isn't any," said the girl unsteadily. "Just that I--I need to
get to Orede, and you're going there. There's no other way to go, now."
"To the contrary," said Calhoun. "There'll undoubtedly be a fleet
heading for Orede as soon as it can be assembled and armed. But I'm
afraid that as a story yours isn't good enough. Try another."
She shivered a little.
"I'm running away...."
"Ah!" said Calhoun. "In that case I'll take you back."
"No!" she said fiercely. "I'll--I'll die first! I'll wreck this ship first!"
Her hand came from behind her. There was a tiny blaster in it. But it
shook visibly as she tried to aim it.
"I'll shoot out the controls!"
Calhoun blinked. He'd had to make a drastic change in his estimate of
the situation the instant he saw that the stowaway was a girl. Now he
had to make another when her threat was not to kill him but to disable
the ship. Women are rarely assassins, and when they are they don't use
energy weapons. Daggers and poisons are more typical. But this girl
threatened to destroy the ship rather than its owner, so she was not
actually an assassin at all.
"I'd rather you didn't do that," said Calhoun dryly. "Besides, you'd get
deadly bored if we were stuck in a derelict waiting for our air and food
to give out."
Murgatroyd, for no reason whatever, felt it necessary to enter the
conversation:

"Chee-chee-chee!"
"A very sensible suggestion," observed Calhoun. "We'll sit down and
have a cup of coffee." To the girl he said, "I'll take you to Orede, since
that's where you say you want to go."
"I have a sweetheart there...."
Calhoun shook his head.
"No," he said reprovingly. "Nearly all the mining colony had packed
itself into the ship that came into Weald with everybody dead. But not
all. And there's been no check of what men were in the ship and what
men weren't. You wouldn't go to Orede if it were likely your sweetheart
had died on the way to you. Here's your coffee. Sugar or saccho, and do
you take cream?"
She trembled a little, but she took the cup.
"I don't understand."
"Murgatroyd and I," explained Calhoun--and he did not know whether
he spoke out of anger or something else--"we are do-gooders. We go
around trying to keep people from getting sick or dying. Sometimes we
even try to keep them from getting killed. It's our profession. We
practise it even on our own behalf. We want to stay alive. So since you
make such drastic threats, we will take you where you want to go.
Especially since we're going there anyhow."
"You don't believe anything I've said!" It was a statement.
"Not a word," admitted Calhoun. "But you'll probably tell us something
more believable presently. When did you eat last?"
"Yesterday."
"Would you rather do your own cooking?" asked Calhoun politely. "Or
would you permit me to ready a snack?"

"I--I'll do it," she said.
She drank her coffee first, however, and then Calhoun showed her how
to punch the readier for such-and-such dishes, to be extracted from
storage and warmed or chilled, as the case might be, and served at
dialed-for intervals. There was also equipment for preparing food for
oneself, in one's own chosen manner--again an item to help make
solitude not unendurable.
Calhoun deliberately immersed himself in the Galactic Directory,
looking up the planet Orede. He was headed there, but he'd had no
reason to inform himself about it before. Now he read with every
appearance of absorption.
The girl ate daintily. Murgatroyd watched with highly amiable interest.
But she looked acutely uncomfortable.
Calhoun finished with the Directory. He got out the micro-film reels
which contained more information. He was specifically after the Med
Service history of all the planets in this sector. He went through the
filmed record of every inspection ever made on Weald and on Dara.
But Sector Twelve had not been run well. There was no adequate
account of a plague which had wiped out three-quarters of the
population of an inhabited planet! It had happened shortly after one
Med Ship visit, and was over before another Med Ship came by.
There should have been a painstaking investigation, even after the fact.
There should have been a collection of infectious material and a
reasonably complete identification and study of the agent. It hadn't
been made. There was probably some other emergency at the time, and
it slipped by. Calhoun, whose career was not to be spent in this sector,
resolved on a blistering report