"You and I, Murgatroyd," said Calhoun, "may be the only wholly rational men on this planet. And you aren't a man."
"Chee!" shrilled Murgatroyd. He seemed glad of it.
"But we have to survey the situation before we attempt anything noble and useless," Calhoun observed. "But still—what's that?"
He stared at a screen which showed lights on the ground moving toward the Med ship. They were carried by men on foot, walking on the snow. As they grew nearer it appeared that there were also weapons in the group. They were curious, ugly instruments—like sporting rifles save that their bores were impossibly large. They would be—Calhoun searched his new store of information. They would be launchers of miniature rockets, capable of firing small missiles with shaped charges which could wreck the Med ship easily.
Thirty yards off, they separated to surround the ship. A single man advanced.
"I'm going to let him in, Murgatroyd," observed Calhoun. "In war time, a man is expected to be polite to anybody with a weapon capable of blowing him up. It's one of the laws of war."
He opened both the inner and outer lock doors. The glow from inside the ship shone out on white, untrodden snow. Calhoun stood in the opening, observing that as his breath went out of the outer opening it turned to white mist.
"My name is Calhoun," he said curtly to the single dark figure still approaching. "Interstellar Medical Service. A neutral, a noncombatant, and at the moment very much annoyed by what has happened!"
A gray-bearded man with grim eyes advanced into the light from the opened port. He nodded.