The girl said faintly:
"If you'd only come earlier.... But it's too late now! I ... thought you came from the city."
"I was headed there," said Calhoun.
"They'll kill you—"
"Yes," agreed Calhoun, "they probably will. But right now you're ill and I'm Med Service. I suspect there's been an epidemic of some disease here, and that for some reason the people in the city don't want the Med Service to know about it. You seem to have ... whatever it is. Also you had a very curious weapon to shoot me with."
The girl said drearily:
"One of our group had made a hobby of such things. Ancient weapons. He had bows and arrows and—what I shot you with was a crossbow. It doesn't need power. Not even chemical explosives. So, when we ran away from the city, he ventured back in and armed us as well as he could."
Calhoun nodded. A little irrelevant talk is always useful at the beginning of a patient-interview. But what she said was not irrelevant. A group of people had fled the city. They'd needed arms, and one of their number had "ventured" back into the city for them. He'd known where to find only reconstructions of ancient lethal devices—a hobby collection. It sounded like people of the civil-service type. Of course there were no longer social classes separated by income. Not on most worlds, anyhow. But there were social groupings based on similar tastes, which had led to similar occupations and went on to natural congeniality. Calhoun placed her, now. He remembered a long-out-moded term, "upper middle class" which no longer meant anything in economics but did in medicine.
"I'd like a case-history," he said conversationally. "Name?"