"Sure! Sure! We'll let 'em land ships they say are hospital ships, loaded down with men and guns! We'll land 'em ourselves, we will!"
There was a click. The spacephone in the control building was turned off.
Calhoun turned back to the sleeping Murgatroyd. There was a movement about the grid-control building. Sleek, glistening ground-cars hurtled away—two of them. Calhoun turned then to the planetary communicator. It could break in on any wave-length used for radio communication under a planet's Heaviside roof. He had to get in touch with Walker or some other of the first-landed colonists. They were still embittered against their home world, but they must be beginning to realize that Calhoun had told the truth about the youngest children. They'd find sickness if they looked for it.
But the planetary communicator picked up nothing. No radiation wave-length was in use. There was no organized news service. The young people on Canis III were too self-centered to care about news. There were no entertainment programs. Only show-offs would want to broadcast, and show-offs would not make the apparatus.
So Calhoun could not communicate save by spacephone, with a range of millions of miles, and the ship's exterior loud-speakers, with a range of hundreds of feet. If he left the Med ship, he wasn't likely to be able to fight his way back in. He couldn't find the younger Walker on foot, in any case, and he did not know anyone else to seek.
Besides, there was work to be done in the ship.
Before Murgatroyd waked, the two ground-cars had returned. At intervals, nearly a dozen other cars followed to the control building, hurtling across the grid's clear center with magnificent clouds of dust following them. They braked violently when they arrived. Youths piled out. Some of them yelled at the Med ship and made threatening gestures. They swarmed into the building.
Murgatroyd said tentatively, "Chee?"
He was awake. Calhoun could have embraced him.