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 Another Random Document on
Scribd Without Any Related Topics
work. If they did not work they did not eat. If they worked and ate,
—Calhoun could see nothing satisfying in being alive on a world like
that! His report to Med Service had been biting. He'd been
prejudiced against businessmen ever since.

But a parachute descended, blowing away from the city. It would

land not too far from the highway he followed. And it didn't occur to
Calhoun not to help the unknown chutist. He saw a small figure
dangling below the chute. He slowed the ground-car as he estimated
where the parachute would land.
He was off the twelve-lane highway and on a feeder road when the
chute was a hundred feet high. He was racing across a field of olive-
green plants that went all the way to the horizon when the
parachute actually touched ground. There was a considerable wind.
The man in the harness bounced. He didn't know how to spill the air.
The chute dragged him.
Calhoun sped ahead, swerved and ran into the chute. He stopped
the car and the chute stopped with it. He got out.
The man lay in a hopeless tangle of cordage. He thrust unskilfully at
it. When Calhoun came up he said suspiciously:
"Have you a knife?"
Calhoun offered a knife, politely opening its blade. The man slashed
at the cords and freed himself. There was an attache case lashed to
his chute harness. He cut at those cords. The attache case not only
came clear, but opened. It dumped out an incredible mass of brand
new, tightly packed interstellar credit certificates. Calhoun could see
that the denominations were one thousand and ten thousand
credits. The man from the chute reached under his armpit and drew
out a blaster.
It was not a service weapon. It was elaborate, practically a toy. With
a dour glance at Calhoun he put it in a side pocket and gathered up
the scattered money. It was an enormous sum, but he packed it
back. He stood up.
"My name is Allison," he said in an authoritative voice. "Arthur
Allison. I'm much obliged. Now I'll ask you to take me to Maya City."
"No," said Calhoun politely. "I just left there. It's deserted. I'm not
going back. There's nobody there."
"But I've important bus—" The other man stared. "It's deserted? But
that's impossible!"
"Quite," agreed Calhoun, "but it's true. It's abandoned. Uninhabited.
Everybody's left it. There's no one there at all."
The man who called himself Allison blinked unbelievingly. He swore.
Then he raged profanely.
But he was not bewildered by the news. Which, upon consideration,
was itself almost bewildering. But then his eyes grew shrewd. He
looked about him.
"My name is Allison," he repeated, as if there were some sort of
magic in the word. "Arthur Allison. No matter what's happened, I've
some business to do here. Where have the people gone? I need to
find them."
"I need to find them too," said Calhoun. "I'll take you with me, if you
like."
"You've heard of me." It was a statement, confidently made.
"Never," said Calhoun politely. "If you're not hurt, suppose you get in
the car? I'm as anxious as you are to find out what's happened. I'm
Med Service."

Allison moved toward the car.

"Med Service, eh? I don't think much of the Med Service! You people
try to meddle in things that are none of your business!"
Calhoun did not answer. The muddy man, clutching the attache case
tightly, waded through the olive-green plants to the car and climbed
in. Murgatroyd said cordially, "Chee-chee!" but Allison viewed him
with distaste.
"What's this?"
"He's Murgatroyd," said Calhoun. "He's a tormal. He's Med service
personnel."
"I don't like beasts," said Allison coldly.
"He's much more important to me than you are," said Calhoun, "if
the matter should come to a test."
Allison stared at him as if expecting him to cringe. Calhoun did not.
Allison showed every sign of being an important man who expected
his importance to be recognized and catered to. When Calhoun
stirred impatiently he got into the car and growled a little. Calhoun
took his place. The ground-car hummed. It rose on the six columns
of air which took the place of wheels and slid across the field of
dark-green plants, leaving the parachute deflated across a number
of rows, and a trail of crushed-down plants where it had moved.
It reached the highway again. Calhoun ran the car up on the
highway's shoulder, and then suddenly checked. He'd noticed
something.
He stopped the car and got out. Where the ploughed field ended,
and before the coated surface of the highway began, there was a
space where on another world one would expect to see green grass.
On this planet grass did not grow; but there would normally be some
sort of self-planted vegetation where there was soil and sunshine
and moisture. There had been such vegetation here, but now there
was only a thin, repellent mass of slimy and decaying foliage.
Calhoun bent down to it.
It had a sour, faintly astringent smell of decay. These were the
ground-cover plants of Maya of which Calhoun had read. They had
motile stems, leaves and flowers, and they had cannibalistic
tendencies. They were the local weeds which made it impossible to
grow grain for human use upon this world.
And they were dead.
Calhoun straightened up and returned to the car. Plants like this
were wilted at the base of the spaceport building, and on another
place where there should have been sward. Calhoun had seen a
large dead member of the genus in a florist's, that had been growing
in a cage before it died. There was a singular coincidence here:
humans ran away from something, and something caused the death
of a particular genus of cannibal weeds.
It did not exactly add up to anything in particular, and certainly
wasn't evidence for anything at all. But Calhoun drove on in a
vaguely puzzled mood. The germ of a guess was forming in his
mind. He couldn't pretend to himself that it was likely, but it was
surely no more unlikely than most of a million human beings
abandoning their homes at a moment's notice.

III
They came to the turnoff for a town called Tenochitlan, some forty
miles from Maya City. Calhoun swung off the highway to go through
it.
Whoever had chosen the name Maya for this planet had been
interested in the legends of Yucatan, back on Earth. There were
many instances of such hobbies in a Med Ship's list of ports of call.
Calhoun touched ground regularly on planets that had been named
for countries and towns when men first roamed the stars, and
nostalgically christened their discoveries with names suggested by
homesickness. There was a Tralee, and a Dorset, and an Eire.
Colonists not infrequently took their world's given name as a pattern
and chose related names for seas and peninsulas and mountain
chains. On Texia the landing-grid rose near a town called Corral and
the principal meat-packing settlement was named Roundup.
Whatever the name Tenochitlan would have suggested, though, was
denied by the town itself. It was small, with a pleasing local type of
architecture. There were shops and some factories, and many
strictly private homes, some clustered close together and others in
the middles of considerable gardens. In those gardens also there
was wilt and decay among the cannibal plants. There was no grass,
because the plants prevented it, but now the motile plants
themselves were dead. Except for the one class of killed growing
things, however, vegetation was luxuriant.
But the little city was deserted. Its streets were empty, its houses
untenanted. Some houses were apparently locked up here, though,
and Calhoun saw three or four shops whose stock in trade had been
covered over before the owners departed. He guessed that either
this town had been warned earlier than the spaceport city, or else
they knew they had time to get in motion before the highways were
filled with the cars from the west.
Allison looked at the houses with keen, evaluating eyes. He did not
seem to notice the absence of people. When Calhoun swung back on
the great road beyond the little city, Allison regarded the endless
fields of dark-green plants with much the same sort of interest.
"Interesting," he said abruptly when Tenochitlan fell behind and
dwindled to a speck. "Very interesting! I'm interested in land. Real
property, that's my business. I've a land-owning corporation on
Thanet Three. I've some holdings on Dorset, too, and elsewhere. It
just occurred to me: what's all this land and the cities worth, with
the people all run away?"
"What," asked Calhoun, "are the people worth who've run?"
Allison paid no attention. He looked shrewd. Thoughtful.
"I came here to buy land," he said. "I'd arranged to buy some
hundreds of square miles. I'd buy more if the price were right. But—
as things are, it looks like the price of land ought to go down quite a
bit. Quite a bit!"
"It depends," said Calhoun, "on whether there's anybody left alive to
sell it to you, and what sort of thing has happened."
Allison looked at him sharply.
"Ridiculous!" he said authoritatively. "There's no question of their
being alive!"
"They thought there might be," observed Calhoun. "That's why they
ran away. They hoped they'd be safe where they ran to. I hope they
are."
Allison ignored the comment. His eyes remained intent and shrewd.
He was not bewildered by the flight of the people of Maya. His mind
was busy with contemplation of that flight from the standpoint of a
man of business.

The car went racing onward. The endless fields of dark green rushed
past to the rear. The highway was deserted, just three strips of
surfaced road, mathematically straight, going on to the horizon.
They went on by tens and scores of miles, each strip wide enough to
allow four ground-cars to run side by side. The highway was
intended to allow all the produce of all these fields to be taken to
market or a processing plant at the highest possible speed and in
any imaginable quantity. The same roads had allowed the cities to
be deserted instantly the warning—whatever the warning was—
arrived.
Fifty miles beyond Tenochitlan there was a mile-long strip of sheds
containing agricultural machinery for crop culture and trucks to carry
the crops to market. There was no sign of life about the machinery,
nor in a further hour's run to westward.
Then there was a city visible to the left. But it was not served by this
particular highway, but another. There was no sign of any movement
in its streets. It moved along the horizon to the left and rear.
Presently it disappeared.
Half an hour later still, Murgatroyd said:
"Chee!"
He stirred uneasily. A moment later he said "Chee!" again.
Calhoun turned his eyes from the road. Murgatroyd looked unhappy.
Calhoun ran his hand over the tormal's furry body. Murgatroyd
pressed against him. The car raced on. Murgatroyd whimpered a
little. Calhoun's hand felt the little animal's muscles tense sharply,
and then relax, and after a little tense again. Murgatroyd said almost
hysterically:
"Chee-chee-chee-chee!"
Calhoun stopped the car, but Murgatroyd did not seem to be
relieved. Allison said impatiently, "What's the matter?"
"That's what I'm trying to find out," said Calhoun.
He felt Murgatroyd's pulse. The role of Murgatroyd in the Med Ship
Esclipus Twenty was not only that of charming companion in the
long, isolated runs in overdrive. Murgatroyd was a part of the Med
Service. His tribe had been discovered on a planet in the Deneb
sector, and men had made pets of them, to the high satisfaction of
the tormals. Presently it was discovered that veterinarians never had
tormals for patients. They were invariably in robustuous good health.
They contracted no infections from other animals; they shared no
infections with anybody else. The Med Service discovered that
tormals possessed a dynamic immunity to germ and bacteria-caused
diseases. Even viruses injected into their bloodstreams only
provoked an immediate, overwhelming development of antibodies,
so that tormals couldn't be given any known disease. Which was of
infinite value to the Med Service.
Now every Med Ship that could be supplied with a tormal carried a
small, affectionate, whiskered member of the tribe. Men liked them,
and they adored men. And when, as sometimes happened, by
mutation or the simple enmity of nature, a new kind of infection
appeared in human society—why—tormals defeated it. They
produced specific antibodies to destroy it. Men analyzed the
antibodies and synthesized them, and they were available to all the
humans who needed them. So a great many millions of humans
stayed alive, because tormals were pleasant little animals with a
precious genetic gift of good health.

Calhoun looked at his sweep-second watch, timing the muscular

spasms that Murgatroyd displayed. They coincided with irregularities
in Murgatroyd's heartbeat, coming at approximately two-second
intervals. The tautening of the muscles lasted just about half a
second.
"But I don't feel it!" said Calhoun.
Murgatroyd whimpered again and said, "Chee-chee!"
"What's going on?" demanded Allison with the impatience of a very
important man indeed. "If the beast's sick, he's sick! I've got to find
—"
Calhoun opened his med kit and went carefully through it until he
found what he needed. He put a pill into Murgatroyd's mouth.
"Swallow it!" he commanded.
Murgatroyd resisted, but the pill went down. Calhoun watched him
sharply. Murgatroyd's digestive system was delicate, but it was
dependable. Anything that might be poisonous, Murgatroyd's
stomach rejected instantly and emphatically.
The pill stayed down.
"Look!" said Allison indignantly. "I've got business to do! In this
attache case I have millions of interstellar credits, in cash, to pay
down on purchases of land and factories. I ought to make some
damned good deals! And I figure that that's as important as
anything else you can think of! It's a damned sight more important
than a beast with a belly-ache!"
Calhoun looked at him coldly.
"Do you own land on Texia?" he asked.
Allison's mouth dropped open. Extreme suspicion and unease
appeared on his face. As a sign of the unease, his hand went to the
side coat pocket in which he'd put a blaster. He didn't pluck it out.
Calhoun's left fist swung around and landed. He took Allison's
elaborate pocket blaster and threw it away among the monotonous
rows of olive-green plants. He returned to absorbed observation of
Murgatroyd.
In five minutes the muscular spasms diminished. In ten, Murgatroyd
frisked. But he seemed to think that Calhoun had done something
remarkable. In the warmest of tones he said:
"Chee!"
"Very good," said Calhoun. "We'll go ahead. I suspect you'll do as
well as we do—for a while."
The car lifted the few inches the air columns sustained it above the
ground. It went on, still to the eastward. But Calhoun drove more
slowly now.
"Something was giving Murgatroyd rhythmic muscular spasms," he
said coldly. "I gave him medication to stop them. He's more sensitive
than we are, so he reacted to a stimulus we haven't noticed yet. But
I think we'll notice it presently."
Allison seemed to be dazed at the affront given him. It appeared to
be unthinkable that anybody might lay hands on him.
"What the devil has that to do with me?" he demanded angrily. "And
what did you hit me for? You're going to pay for this!"
"Until I do," Calhoun told him, "you'll be quiet. And it does have the
devil to do with you. There was a Med Service gadget once—a tricky
little device to produce contraction of chosen muscles. It was useful
for re-starting stopped hearts without the need of an operation. It
regulated the beat of hearts that were too slow or dangerously
irregular. But some businessman had a bright idea and got a tame
researcher to link that gadget to ground induction currents. I
suspect you know that businessman!"
"I don't know what you're talking about," snapped Allison. But he
was singularly tense.
"I do," said Calhoun unpleasantly. "I made a public health inspection
on Texia a couple of years ago. The whole planet is a single,
gigantic, cattle-raising enterprise. They don't use metal fences—the
herds are too big to be stopped by such things. They don't use
cowboys—they cost money. On Texia they use ground-induction and
the Med Service gadget linked together to serve as cattle fences.
They act like fences, though they're projected through the ground.
Cattle become uncomfortable when they try to cross them. So they
draw back. So men control them. They move them from place to
place by changing the cattle fences, which are currents induced in
the ground. The cattle have to keep moving or be punished by the
moving fence. They're even driven into the slaughterhouse chutes by
ground-induction fields! That's the trick on Texia, where induction
fields herd cattle. I think it's the trick on Maya, where people are
herded like cattle and driven out of their cities so the value of their
fields and factories will drop,—so a land buyer can find bargains!"
"You're insane!" snapped Allison. "I just landed on this planet! You
saw me land! I don't know what happened before I got here! How
could I?"
"You might have arranged it," said Calhoun.
Allison assumed an air of offended and superior dignity. Calhoun
drove the car onward at very much less than the head-long pace
he'd been keeping to. Presently he looked down at his hands on the
steering wheel. Now and then the tendons to his fingers seemed to
twitch. At rhythmic intervals, the skin crawled on the back of his
hands. He glanced at Allison. Allison's hands were tightly clenched.
"There's a ground-induction fence in action, all right," said Calhoun
calmly. "You notice? It's a cattle fence and we're running into it. If
we were cattle, now, we'd turn around and move away."
"I don't know what you're talking about!" said Allison.
But his hands stayed clenched. Calhoun slowed the car still more. He
began to feel, all over his body, that every muscle tended to twitch
at the same time. It was a horrible sensation. His heart muscles
tended to contract too, simultaneously with the rest, but one's heart
has its own beat rate. Sometimes the normal beat coincided with the
twitch. Then his heart pounded violently—so violently that it was
painful. But equally often the imposed contraction of the heart
muscles came just after a normal contraction, and then it stayed
tightly knotted for half a second. It missed a beat, and the feeling
was agony.
No animal would have pressed forward in the face of such
sensations. It would have turned back long ago. No animal. Not
even Man.
Calhoun stopped the car. He looked at Murgatroyd. Murgatroyd was
completely himself. He looked inquiringly at Calhoun. Calhoun
nodded to him, but he spoke—with some difficulty—to Allison.
"We'll see—if this thing—builds up. You know that it's the Texia—
trick. A ground-induction unit set up—here. It drove people—like
cattle. Now we've—run into it.—It's holding people—like cattle."
He panted. His chest muscles contracted with the rest, so that his
breathing was interfered with. But Murgatroyd, who'd been made
uneasy and uncomfortable before Calhoun noticed anything wrong,
was now bright and frisky. Medication had desensitized his muscles
to outside stimuli. He would be able to take a considerable electric
shock without responding to it.
But he could be killed by one that was strong enough.
A savage anger filled Calhoun. Everything fitted together. Allison had
put his hand convenient to his blaster when Calhoun mentioned
Texia. It meant that Calhoun suspected what Allison knew to be
true. A cattle-fence unit had been set up on Maya, and it was
holding—like cattle—the people it had previously driven—like cattle.
Calhoun could deduce with some precision exactly what had been
done. The first experience of Maya with the cattle fence would have
been very mild. It would have been low-power, causing just enough
uneasiness to be noticed. It would have moved from west to east,
slowly, and it would have reached a certain spot and there faded
out. And it would have been a mystery and an uncomfortable thing,
and nobody would understand it on Maya. In a week it would almost
be forgotten. But then there'd come a stronger disturbance. And it
would travel like the first one; down the length of the peninsula on
which the colony lay, but stopping at the same spot as before, and
then fading away to nothingness. And this also would have seemed
mysterious. But nobody would suspect humans of causing it. There
would be theorizing and much questioning, but it would be
considered an unfamiliar natural event.
Probably the third use of the cattle fence would be most disturbing.
This time it would be acutely painful. But it would move into the
cities and through them and past them, and it would go down the
peninsula to where it had stopped and faded on two previous
occasions.
The people of Maya would be disturbed and scared. But they
considered that they knew it began to the westward of Maya City,
and moved toward the east at such-and-such a speed, and it went
so far and no farther. And they would organize themselves to apply
this carefully worked out information.
It would not occur to any of them that they had learned how to be
driven like cattle.

Calhoun, of course, could only reason that this must have happened.
But nothing else could have taken place. Perhaps there were more
than three uses of the moving cattle fence to get the people
prepared to move past the known place at which it always faded to
nothingness. They might have been days apart, or weeks apart, or
months. There might have been stronger manifestations followed by
weaker ones and then stronger ones again.
But there was an inductive cattle fence across the highway here.
Calhoun had driven into it. Every two seconds the muscles of his
body tensed. Sometimes his heart missed a beat at the time that his
breathing stopped, and sometimes it pounded violently. It seemed
that the symptoms became more and more unbearable.
He got out his med kit, with hands that spasmodically jerked
uncontrollably. He fumbled out the same medication he'd given
Murgatroyd. He took two of the pellets.
"In reason," he said coldly, "I ought to let you take what this
damned thing would give you. But—here!"
Allison had panicked. The idea of a cattle fence suggested
discomfort, of course, but it did not imply danger. The experience of
a cattle fence, designed for huge hoofed beasts instead of men, was
terrifying. Allison gasped. He made convulsive movements. Calhoun
himself moved erratically. For one and a half seconds out of two, he
could control his muscles. For half a second at a time, he could not.
But he poked a pill into Allison's mouth.
"Swallow it!" he commanded. "Swallow!"
The ground-car rested tranquilly on the highway, which here went
on for a mile and then dipped in a gentle incline and then rose once
more. The totally level fields to right and left came to an end here.
Native trees grew, trailing preposterously with long fronds.
Brushwood hid much of the ground. That looked normal. But the
lower, ground-covering vegetation was wilted and rotting.
Allison choked upon the pellet. Calhoun forced a second upon him.
Murgatroyd looked inquisitively at first one and then the other of the
two men. He said:
"Chee? Chee?"
Calhoun lay back in his seat, breathing carefully to keep alive. But he
couldn't do anything about his heartbeat. The sun shone brightly,
though now it was low, toward the horizon. There were clouds in the
reddened sky. A gentle breeze blew. Everything, to outward
appearance, was peaceful and tranquil and commonplace upon this
small world.
But in the area that human beings had taken over there were cities
which were still and silent and deserted, and somewhere—
somewhere!—the population of the planet waited uneasily for the
latest of a series of increasingly terrifying phenomena to come to an
end. Up to this time the strange, creeping, universal affliction had
begun at one place, and moved slowly to another, and then
diminished and ceased to be. But this was the greatest and worst of
the torments. And it hadn't ended. It hadn't diminished. After three
days it continued at full strength at the place where previously it had
stopped and died away.
The people of Maya were frightened. They couldn't return to their
homes. They couldn't go anywhere. They hadn't prepared for an
emergency to last for days. They hadn't brought supplies of food.
It began to look as if they were going to starve.

IV
Calhoun was in very bad shape when the sports car came to the end
of the highway.
First, all the multiple roadways of the route that had brought him
here were joined by triple ribbons of road-surface from the north.
For a space there were twenty-four lanes available to traffic. They
flowed together, and then there were twelve. Here there was
evidence of an enormous traffic concentration at some time now
past. Brush and small trees were crushed and broken where cars
had been forced to travel off the hard-surface roadways and through
undergrowth. The twelve lanes dwindled to six, and the unpaved
area on either side showed that innumerable cars had been forced
to travel off the highway altogether. Then there were three lanes,
and then two, and finally only a single ribbon of pavement where no
more than two cars could run side by side. The devastation on either
hand was astounding. All visible vegetation for half a mile to right
and left was crushed and tangled. And then the narrow surfaced
road ceased to be completely straight. It curved around a hillock—
and here the ground was no longer perfectly flat—and came to an
end.
And Calhoun saw all the ground-cars of the planet gathered and
parked together.
There were no buildings. There were no streets. There was nothing
of civilization but tens and scores of thousands of ground-cars. They
were extraordinary to look at, stopped at random, their fronts
pointed in all directions, their air-column tubes thrusting into the
ground so that there might be trouble getting them clear again.
Parked bumper to bumper in closely placed lines, in theory twenty-
five thousand cars could be parked on a square mile of ground. But
there were very many times that number of cars here, and some
places were unsuitable for parking, and there were lanes placed at
random and there'd been no special effort to put the maximum
number of cars in the smallest place. So the surface transportation
system of the planet Maya spread out over some fifty sprawling
square miles. Here, cars were crowded closely. There, there was
much room between them. But it seemed that as far as one could
see in the twilight there were glistening vehicles gathered
confusedly, so there was nothing else to be seen but an occasional
large tree rising from among them.
Calhoun came to the end of the surfaced road. He'd waited for the
pellets he'd taken and given to Allison to have the effect they'd had
on Murgatroyd. That had come about. He'd driven on. But the
strength of the inductor field had increased to the intolerable. When
he stopped the sports car he showed the effects of what he'd been
through.
Figures on foot converged upon him instantly. There were eager
calls.
"It's stopped? You got through? We can go back?"
Calhoun shook his head. It was just past sunset and many brilliant
colorings showed in the western sky, but they couldn't put color into
Calhoun's face. His cheeks were grayish and his eyes were deep-
sunk, and he looked like someone in the last stages of exhaustion.
He said heavily:
"It's still there. We came through. I'm Med Service. Have you got a
government here? I need to talk to somebody who can give orders."

If he'd asked two days earlier there would have been no answer,
because the fugitives were only waiting for a disaster to come to an
end. One day earlier, he might have found men with authority busily
trying to arrange for drinking water for something like two millions of
people, in the entire absence of wells or pumps or ways of making
either. And if he'd been a day later, it is rather likely that he'd have
found savage disorder. But he arrived at sundown three days after
the flight from the cities. There was no food to speak of, and water
was drastically short, and the fugitives were only beginning to
suspect that they would never be able to leave this place—and that
they might die here.
Men left the growing crowd about the sports car to find individuals
who could give orders. Calhoun stayed in the car, resting from the
unbearable strain he'd undergone. The ground-inductor cattle fence
had been ten miles deep. One mile was not bad. Only Murgatroyd
had noticed it. After two miles Calhoun and Allison suffered; but the
medication strengthened them to take it. But there'd been a long,
long way in the center of the induction-field in which existence was
pure torment. Calhoun's muscles defied him for part of every two-
second cycle, and his heart and lungs seemed constantly about to
give up even the pretense of working. In that part of the cattle-fence
field, he'd hardly dared drive faster than a crawl, in order to keep
control of the car when his own body was uncontrollable. But
presently the field strength lessened and ultimately ended.
Now Murgatroyd looked cordially at the figures who clustered about
the car. He'd hardly suffered at all. He'd had half as much of the
medication as Calhoun himself, and his body weight was only a tenth
of Calhoun's. He'd made out all right. Now he looked expectantly at
what became a jammed mass of crowding men about the vehicle
that had come through the invisible barrier across the highway. They
hoped desperately for news to produce hope. But Murgatroyd waited
zestfully for somebody to welcome him and offer him cakes and
sweets, and undoubtedly presently a cup of coffee.
But nobody did.
It was a long time before there was a stirring at the edge of the
crowd. Night had fully fallen then, and for miles and miles in all
directions lights in the ground cars of Maya's inhabitants glowed
brightly. They drew upon broadcast power, naturally, for their motors
and their lights. Off to one side someone shouted. Calhoun turned
on his headlights for a guide. More shoutings. A knot of men
struggled to get through the crowd. With difficulty, presently, they
reached the car.
"They say you got through," panted a tall man, "but you can't get
back. They say—"
Calhoun roused himself. Allison, beside him, stirred. The tall man
panted again:
"I'm the planetary president. What can we do?"
"First, listen," said Calhoun tiredly.
He'd had a little rest. Not much, but some. The actual work he'd
done in driving three hundred-odd miles from Maya City was trivial.
But the continuous, and lately violent, spasms of his heart and
breathing muscles had been exhausting. He heard Murgatroyd say
ingratiatingly, "Chee-chee-chee-chee," and put his hand on the little
animal to quiet him.
"The thing you ran away from," said Calhoun with effort, "is a type
of ground-induction field using broadcast power from the grid. It's
used on Texia to confine cattle to their pastures and to move them
where they're wanted to be. But it was designed for cattle. It's a
cattle fence. It could kill humans."

He went on, his voice gaining strength and steadiness as he spoke.

He explained, precisely, how a ground-induction field was projected
in a line at a right angle to its source. It could be moved by
adjustments of the apparatus by which it was projected.
"But—but if it uses broadcast power," the planetary president said
urgently, "then if the power broadcast is cut off it has to stop! If you
got through it coming here, tell us how to get through going back
and we'll cut off the power broadcast ourselves! We've got to do
something immediately. The whole planet's here. There's no food!
There's no water! Something has to be done before we begin to
die!"
"But," said Calhoun, "if you cut off the power you'll die anyway!
You've got a couple of million people here, and you're a hundred
miles from food. Without power you couldn't get to food or bring it
here. Cut the power and you're still stranded here. Without power
you'll die as soon as with it."
There was a sound from the listening men around. It was partly a
growl and partly a groan.
"I've just found this out," said Calhoun. "I didn't know until the last
ten miles exactly what the situation was, and I had to come here to
be sure. Now I need some people to help me. It won't be pleasant. I
may have enough medication to get a dozen people back through.
It'll be safer if I take only six. Get a doctor to pick me six men. Good
heart action. Sound lungs. Two should be electronics engineers. The
others should be good shots. If you get them ready, I'll give them
the same stuff that got us through. It's desensitizing medication, but
it will do only so much. And try and find some weapons for them."
Voices murmured all around. Men hastily explained to other men
what Calhoun had said. The creeping disaster before which they'd all
fled,—it was not a natural catastrophe, but an artificial one! Men had
made it! They'd been herded here and their wives and children were
hungry because of something men had done!
A low-pitched, buzzing, humming sound came from the crowd about
the sports car. For the moment, nobody asked what could be the
motive for men to do what had been done. Pure fury filled the mob.
Calhoun leaned closer to Allison.
"I wouldn't get out of the car if I were you," he said in a low tone. "I
certainly wouldn't try to buy any real property at a low price!"
Allison shivered. There was a vast, vast stirring as the explanation
passed from man to man. Figures moved away in the darkness.
Lighted car windows winked as they moved through the obscurity.
The population of Maya was spread out over very many square miles
of what had been wilderness, and there was no elaborate
communication system by which information could be spread quickly.
But long before dawn there'd be nobody who didn't know that they'd
fled from a man-made danger and were held here like cattle, behind
a cattle fence, apparently abandoned to die.
Allison's teeth chattered. He was a business man and up to now he'd
thought as one. He'd made decisions in offices, with attorneys and
secretaries and clerks to make the decisions practical and safe,
without any concern for any consequences other than financial ones.
He saw possible consequences to himself, here and now. He'd
landed on Maya because he considered the matter too important to
trust to anybody else. Even riding with Calhoun on the way here,
he'd only been elated and astonished at the success of the intended
coup. He'd raised his aim. For a while he'd believed that he'd end as
the sole proprietor of the colony on Maya, with every plant growing
for his profit, and every factory earning money for him, and every
inhabitant his employee. It had been the most grandiose possible
dream. The details and the maneuvers needed to complete it flowed
into his mind.
But now his teeth chattered. At ten words from Calhoun he would
literally be torn to pieces by the raging men about him. His attache
case with millions of credits in cash—it would be proof of whatever
Calhoun chose to say. Allison knew terror down to the bottom of his
soul. But he dared not move from Calhoun's side, even though a
single sentence in the calmest of voices would destroy him, and he'd
never faced actual, understood, physical danger before.
Presently men came, one by one, to take orders from Calhoun. They
were able-bodied and grim-faced men. Two were electronics
engineers, as he'd specified. One was a policeman. There were two
mechanics and a doctor who was also amateur tennis champion of
the planet. Calhoun doled out to them the pellets that reduced the
sensitiveness of muscles to externally applied stimuli. He gave
instructions. They'd go as far into the cattle fence as they could
reasonably endure. Then they'd swallow the pellets and let them act.
Then they'd go on. His stock of pellets was limited. He could give
three to each man.
Murgatroyd squirmed disappointedly as this briefing went on.
Obviously, he wasn't to make a social success here. He was
annoyed, and he needed more space. Calhoun tossed Allison's
attache case behind the seats. Allison was too terrified to protest. It
still did not increase the space left on the front seat between
Calhoun and Allison.
Four humming ground cars lifted eight inches off the ground and
hovered there on columns of rushing air. Calhoun took the lead. His
headlights moved down the single-lane road to which two joining
twelve-lane highways had shrunk. Behind him, other headlights
moved into line. Calhoun's car moved away into the darkness. The
others followed.
Brilliant stars shone overhead. A cluster of thousands of suns, a
hundred light-years away, made a center of illumination that gave
Maya's night the quality of a vivid if diffused moonlight. The cars
went on. Presently Calhoun felt the twitchings of minor muscular
spasms. He was riding into the field which had been first devised for
purposes remote from the herding of cattle or humans, but applied
to the first use on the planet Texia, and now applied to the second
here.
The road became two, and then four, and then eight lanes wide.
Then four lanes swirled off to one side, and the remaining four
presently doubled, and then widened again, and it was the twelve-
lane turnpike that had brought Calhoun here from Maya City.

But the rhythmic interference with his body grew stronger. Allison
had spoken not one single word while Calhoun conferred with the
people of Maya beyond the highway. His teeth chattered as they
started back. He didn't attempt to speak during the beginning of the
ride through the cattle-fence field. His teeth chattered, and stopped,
and chattered again, and at long last he panted despairingly:
"Are you going to let the thing kill me?"
Calhoun stopped. The cars behind him stopped. He gave Allison two
pellets and took two himself. With Murgatroyd insistently
accompanying him, he went along the cars which trailed him. He
made sure the six men he'd asked for took their pellets and that
they had an adequate effect. He went back to the sports car.
Allison whimpered a little when he and Murgatroyd got back in.
"I thought," said Calhoun conversationally, "that you might try to
take off by yourself, just now. It would solve a problem for me. Of
course it wouldn't solve any for you. But I don't think your problems
have any solution, now."
He started the car up again. It moved forward. The other cars trailed
dutifully. They went on through the starlit night. Calhoun noted that
the effect of the cattle fence was less than it had been before. The
first desensitizing pellets had not wholly lost their effect when he
added to it. But he kept his speed low until he was certain the other
drivers had endured the anguish of passing through the cattle-fence
field.
Presently he was confident that the cattle field was past. He sent his
car up to eighty miles an hour. The other cars followed faithfully. To
a hundred. They did not drop behind. The car hummed through the
night at top speed—a hundred and twenty, a hundred and thirty
miles an hour. The three other cars' headlights faithfully kept pace
with him.
Allison, said desperately, "Look! I—don't understand what's
happened. You talk as if I'd planned all this. I—did have advance
notice of a—a research project here. But it shouldn't have held the
people there for days! Something went wrong! I only believed that
people would want to leave Maya. I'd only planned to buy as much
acreage as I could, and control of as many factories as possible.
That's all! It was business! Only business!"
Calhoun did not answer. Allison might be telling the truth. Some
businessmen would think it only intelligent to frighten people into
selling their holdings below true value. Something of the sort
happened every day in stock exchanges. But the people of Maya
could have died!
For that matter, they still might. They couldn't return to their homes
and food so long as broadcast power kept the cattle-fence in
existence. But they could not return to their homes and food
supplies if the power broadcast was cut off, either.
Over all the night surface of the world of Maya there was light only
on one highway at one spot, and a multitude of smaller, lesser lights
where the people of Maya waited to find out whether they would live
or die.

V
Calhoun considered coldly. They were beyond what had been the
farthest small city on the multiple highway. They would go on past
now-starlit fields of plants native to Maya, passing many places
where trucks loaded with the plants climbed up to the roadway and
headed for the factories which made use of them. The fields ran for
scores of miles along the highway's length. They reached out
beyond the horizon,—perhaps scores of miles in that direction, too.
There were thousands upon thousands of square miles devoted to
the growing of the dark-green vegetation which supplied the raw
materials for Maya's space exports. Some hundred-odd miles ahead,
the small town of Tenochitlan lay huddled in the light of the distant
star-cluster. Beyond that, more highway and Maya City. Beyond that
—
Calhoun reasoned that the projector to make the induction cattle
fence would be beyond Maya City, somewhere in the mountains the
photograph in the spaceport building showed. A large highway went
into those mountains for a limited distance only.
A ground-inductor projector field always formed at a right angle to
the projector which was its source. It could be adjusted—the process
was analogous to focusing—to come into actual being at any
distance desired, and the distance could be changed. To drive the
people of Maya City eastward, the projector of a cattle fence—about
which they would know nothing; it would be totally strange and
completely mysterious—the projector of the cattle fence would need
to be west of the people to be driven. Logically, it would belong in
the mountains. Practically, it would be concealed. Drawing on
broadcast power to do its work, there would be no large power
source needed to give it the six million kilowatts it required. It
should be quite easy to hide beyond any quick or easy discovery.
Hunting it out might require weeks of searching.
But the people beyond the end of the highway couldn't wait. They
had no food, and holes scrabbled down to ground-water by men
digging with their bare hands simply would not be adequate. The
cattle fence had to be cut off immediately—while the broadcast of
power had to be continued.
Calhoun made an abrupt grunting noise. Phrasing the thing that
needed to be done was practically a blueprint of how to do it.
Simple! He'd need the two electronics engineers, of course. But that
would be the trick....
He drove on at a hundred thirty miles an hour with his lips set wrily.
The three other cars came behind him. Murgatroyd watched the way
ahead. Mile after mile, half-minute after half-minute, the headlights
cast brilliantly blinding beams before the cars. Murgatroyd grew
bored. He said, "Chee!" in a discontented fashion and tried to curl up
between Allison and Calhoun. There wasn't room. He crawled over
the seat-back. He moved about, back there. There were rustling
sounds. He settled down. Presently there was silence. Undoubtedly
he had draped his furry tail across his nose and gone soundly off to
sleep.
Allison spoke suddenly. He'd had time to think, but he had no
practice in various ways of thinking.
"How much money have you got?" he asked.
"Not much," said Calhoun. "Why?"
"I—haven't done anything illegal," said Allison, with an unconvincing
air of confidence, "but I could be put to some inconvenience if you
were to accuse me before others of what you've accused me
personally. You seem to think that I planned a criminal act. That the
action I know of—the research project I'd heard of—that it became—
that it got out of hand is likely. But I am entirely in the clear. I did
nothing in which I did not have the advice of counsel. I am legally
unassailable. My lawyers—"

"That's none of my business," Calhoun told him. "I'm a medical man.

I landed here in the middle of what seemed to be a serious public
health situation. I went to see what had happened. I've found out. I
still haven't the answer,—not the whole answer anyway. But the
human population of Maya is in a state of some privation, not to say
danger. I hope to end it. But I've nothing to do with anybody's guilt
or innocence of crime or criminal intent or anything else."
Allison swallowed. Then he said with smooth confidence:
"But you could cause me inconvenience. I would appreciate it if you
would—would—"
"Cover up what you've done?" asked Calhoun.
"No! I've done nothing wrong. But you could simply use discretion. I
landed by parachute to complete some business deals I'd arranged
months ago. I will go through with them. I will leave on the next
ship. That's perfectly open and above board. Strictly business. But
you could make a—an unpleasing public image of me. Yet I have
done nothing any other business man wouldn't do! I did happen to
know of a research project—"
"I think," said Calhoun without heat, "that you sent men here with a
cattle-fence device from Texia to frighten the people on Maya. They
wouldn't know what was going on. They'd be scared; they'd want to
get away. So you'd be able to buy up practically all the colony for the
equivalent of peanuts. I can't prove that," he conceded, "but that's
my opinion. But you want me not to state it. Is that right?"
"Exactly!" said Allison. He'd been shaken to the core, but he
managed the tone and the air of a dignified man of business
discussing an unpleasant subject with fine candor. "I assure you you
are mistaken. You agree that you can't prove your suspicions. If you
can't prove them, you shouldn't state them. That is simple ethics.
You agree to that!"
Calhoun looked at him curiously.
"Are you waiting for me to tell you my price?"
"I'm waiting," said Allison reprovingly, "for you to agree not to cause
me embarrassment. I won't be ungrateful. After all, I'm a person of
some influence. I could do a great deal to your benefit. I'd be glad
—"
"Are you working around to guess at a price I'll take?" asked
Calhoun with the same air of curiosity.
He seemed much more curious than indignant, and much more
amused than curious. Allison sweated suddenly. Calhoun didn't
appear to be bribable. But Allison knew desperation.
"If you want to put it that way—yes," he said harshly. "You can
name your own figure. I mean it!"
"I won't say a word about you," said Calhoun. "I won't need to. The
characters who're operating your cattle fence will do all the talking
that's necessary. Things all fit together,—except for one item.
They've been dropping into place all the while we've been driving
down this road."
"I said you can name your own figure!" Allison's voice was shrill. "I
mean it! Any figure! Any!"
Calhoun shrugged.
"What would a Med Ship man do with money? Forget it!"
He drove on. The highway turnoff to Tenochitlan appeared. Calhoun
went steadily past it. The other connection with the road through
the town appeared. He left it behind.
Allison's teeth chattered again.
The buildings of Maya City began to appear, some twenty minutes
later. Calhoun slowed and the other cars closed up. He opened a
window and called:
"We want to go to the landing-grid first. Somebody lead the way!"
A car went past and guided the rest assuredly to a ramp down from
the now-elevated road, and through utterly dark streets, of which
some were narrow and winding, and came out abruptly where the
landing-grid rose skyward. At the bottom its massive girders looked
huge and cyclopean in the starlight, but the higher courses looked
like silver lace against the stars.

They went to the control building. Calhoun got out. Murgatroyd

hopped out after him, dust clinging to his fur. He shook himself, and
a ten-thousand-credit interstellar credit certificate fell to the ground.
Murgatroyd had made a soft place for sleeping out of the contents of
Allison's attache case. It was assuredly the most expensive if not the
most comfortable sleeping cushion a tormal ever had. Allison sat still
as if numbed. He did not even pick up the certificate.
"I need you two electronics men," said Calhoun. Then he said
apologetically to the others, "I only figured out something on the
way here. I'd believed we might have to take some drastic action,
come daybreak. But now I doubt it. I do suggest, though, that you
turn off the car headlights and get set to do some shooting if
anybody turns up. I don't know whether they will or not."
He led the way inside. He turned on lights. He went to the place
where dials showed the amount of power actually being used of the
enormous amount available. Those dials now showed an extremely
small power drain, considering that the cities of a planet depended
on the grid. But the cities were dark and empty of people. The
demand needle wavered back and forth, rhythmically. Every two
seconds the demand for power went up by six million kilowatts,
approximately. The demand lasted for half a second, and stopped.
For a second and a half the power in use was reduced by six million
kilowatts. During this period only automatic pumps and ventilators
and freezing equipment drew on the broadcast power for energy.
Then the six-million-kilowatt demand came again for half a second.
"The cattle fence," said Calhoun, "works for half a second out of
every two seconds. It's intermittent or it would simply paralyze
animals that wandered into it. Or people. Being intermittent, it drives
them out instead. There'll be tools and parts for equipment here, in
case something needs repair. I want you to make something new."
The two electronics technicians asked questions.
"We need," said Calhoun, "an interruptor that will cut off the power
broadcast for the half-second the ground-induction field is supposed
to be on. Then it should turn on the broadcast power for the second
and a half the cattle fence is supposed to be off. That will stop the
cattle-fence effect, and I think a ground car should be able to work
with power that's available for three half-seconds out of four."
The electronics men blinked at him. Then they grinned and set to
work. Calhoun went exploring. He found a lunch box in a desk with
three very stale sandwiches in it. He offered them around.
It appeared that nobody wanted to eat while their families—at the
end of the highway—were still hungry.
The electronics men called on the two mechanics to help build
something. They explained absorbedly to Calhoun that they were
making a cutoff which would adjust to any sudden six-million-
kilowatt demand, no matter what time interval was involved. A
change in the tempo of the cattle-fence cycle wouldn't bring it back
on.
"That's fine!" said Calhoun. "I wouldn't have thought of that!"
He bit into a stale sandwich and went outside. Allison sat limply,
despairingly, in his seat in the car.
"The cattle fence is going off," said Calhoun without triumph. "The
people of the city will probably begin to get here around sunrise."
"I—I did nothing legally wrong!" said Allison, dry-throated. "Nothing!
They'd have to prove that I knew what the—consequences of the
research project would be. That couldn't be proved! It couldn't! So
I've done nothing legally wrong...."
Calhoun went inside, observing that the doctor who was also tennis
champion, and the policeman who'd come to help him, were keeping
keen eyes on the city and the foundations of the grid and all other
places from which trouble might come.
There was a fine atmosphere of achievement in the power-control
room. The power itself did not pass through these instruments, but
relays here controlled buried massive conductors which supplied the
world with power. And one of the relays had been modified. When
the cattle-fence projector closed its circuit, the power went off.
When the ground-inductor went off, the power went on. There was
no longer a barrier across the highways leading to the east. It was
more than probable that ground cars could run on current supplied
for one and a half seconds out of every two. They might run jerkily,
but they would run.

Half an hour later, the amount of power drawn from the broadcast
began to rise smoothly and gradually. It could mean only that cars
were beginning to move.
Forty-five minutes later still, Calhoun heard stirrings outside. He
went out. The two men on guard gazed off into the city. Something
moved there. It was a ground-car, running slowly and without lights.
Calhoun said undisturbedly:
"Whoever was running the cattle fence found out their gadget wasn't
working. Their lights flickered, too. They came to see what was the
matter at the landing-grid. But they've seen the lighted windows.
Got your blasters handy?"
But the unlighted car turned and raced away. Calhoun only
shrugged.
"They haven't a prayer," he said. "We'll take over their apparatus as
soon as it's light. It'll be too big to destroy, and there'll be
fingerprints and such to identify them as the men who ran it. And
they're not natives. When the police start to look for the strangers
who were living where the cattle-fence projector was set up.... They
can go into the jungles where there's nothing to eat, or they can
give themselves up."
He moved toward the door of the control building once more. Allison
said desperately:
"They'll have hidden their equipment. You'll never be able to find it!"
Calhoun shook his head in the starlight.
"Anything that can fly can spot it in minutes. Even on the ground
one can walk almost straight to it. You see, something happened
they didn't count on. That's why they've left it turned on at full
power. The earlier, teasing uses of the cattle fence were low-power.
Annoying, to start with, and uncomfortable the second time, and
maybe somewhat painful the third. But the last time it was full
power."
He shrugged. He didn't feel like a long oration. But it was obvious.
Something had killed the plants of a certain genus of which small
species were weeds that destroyed Earth-type grasses. The ground-
cover plants—and the larger ones, like the one Calhoun had seen
decaying in a florist's shop which had had to be grown in a cage—
the ground-cover plants had motile stems and leaves and blossoms.
They were cannibals. They could move their stems to reach, and
their leaves to enclose, and their flowers to devour other plants,
even perhaps small animals. The point, though, was that they had
some limited power of motion. Earth-style sensitive vines and
flycatcher plants had primitive muscular tissues. The local ground-
cover plants had them too. And the cattle-fence field made those
tissues contract spasmodically. Powerfully. Violently. Repeatedly. Until
they died of exhaustion. The full-power cattle-fence field had
exterminated Mayan ground-cover plants all the way to the end of
the east-bound highway. And inevitably—and very conveniently—also
up to the exact spot where the cattle-fence field had begun to be
projected. There would be an arrow-shaped narrowing of the wiped-
out ground-cover plants where the cattle-field had been projected. It
would narrow to a point which pointed precisely to the cattle-fence
projector.
"Your friends," said Calhoun, "will probably give themselves up and
ask for mercy. There's not much else they can do."
Then he said:
"They might even get it. D'you know, there's an interesting side
effect of the cattle fence. It kills the plants that have kept Earth-type
grasses from growing here. Wheat can be grown here now,
whenever and as much as the people please. It should make this a
pretty prosperous planet, not having to import all its bread."

The ground cars of the inhabitants of Maya City did begin to arrive
at sunrise. Within an hour after daybreak, very savagely intent
persons found the projector and turned it off.
By noon there was still some anger on the faces of the people of
Maya, but there'd been little or no damage, and life took up its
normal course again. Murgatroyd appreciated the fact that things
went back to normal. For him it was normal to be welcomed and
petted when the Med Ship Esclipus Twenty touched ground. It was
normal for him to move zestfully in admiring human society, and to
drink coffee with great gusto.
And while Murgatroyd moved in human society, enjoying himself
hugely, Calhoun went about his business. Which, of course, was
conferences with planetary health officials, politely receiving such
information as they thought important, and tactfully telling them
about the most recent developments in medical science.
What else was a Med Ship man for?
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