"Wait," said the voice from the planet. It sounded strained.

A murmuring sounded, transmitted from fifty thousand miles away. Then there was a click. The transmitter down below had cut off. Calhoun raised his eyebrows again. This was not according to routine. Not at all! The Med Service was badly overworked and understaffed. The resources of interplanetary services were always apt to be stretched to their utmost, because there could be no galactic government as such. Some thousands of occupied planets, the closest of them light-years apart—or weeks of traveling—couldn't hold elections or have political parties for the simple reason that travel even in overdrive was too slow. They could only have service organizations whose authority depended on the consent of the people served, and whose support had to be gathered when and as it was possible.

But the Med Service was admittedly important. The local Sector Headquarters was in the Cetis cluster. It was a sort of interstellar clinic, with additions. It gathered and disseminated the results of experience in health and medicine among some thousands of colony-worlds, and from time to time it made contact with other Headquarters carrying on the same work elsewhere. It admittedly took fifty years for a new technique in gene-selection to cross the so-far-occupied part of the galaxy, but it was a three-year voyage in overdrive to cover the same distance direct. And the Med Service was worth while. There was no problem of human ecological adjustment it had so far been unable to solve, and there were some dozens of planets whose human colonies owed their existence to it. There was nowhere—nowhere at all—that a Med Ship was not welcomed on its errand from Headquarters.

"Aground there!" said Calhoun sharply. "What's the matter? Are you landing me or not?"

There was no answer. Then, suddenly, every sound-producing device in the ship abruptly emitted a hoarse and monstrous noise. The lights flashed up and circuit-breakers cut them off. The nearby-object horn squawked. The hull-temperature warning squealed. The ship's internal gravity-field tugged horribly for an instant and went off. Every device within the ship designed to notify emergency clanged or shrieked or roared or screamed. There was a momentary bedlam.

It lasted for part of a second only. Then everything stopped. There was no weight within the ship, and there were no lights, and there was dead silence, and Murgatroyd made whimpering sounds in the darkness.

Calhoun thought 

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