There was a sensation as if all the universe had turned itself inside out, and Calhoun's stomach tried to follow its example. He gulped, and the feeling ended, and the vision screens came alight. Then there were ten thousand myriads of stars, and a sun flaming balefully ahead, and certain very bright objects nearby. They would be planets, and one of them showed as a crescent.
Calhoun checked the solar spectrum as a matter of course. This was the sun Tallien. He checked the brighter specks in view. Three were planets and one a remote brilliant star. The crescent was Tallien Three, third out from its sun and the Med Ship's immediate destination. It was a very good breakout; too good to be anything but luck. Calhoun swung the ship for the crescent planet. He matter-of-factly checked the usual items. He was going in at a high angle to the ecliptic, so meteors and bits of stray celestial trash weren't likely to be bothersome. He made other notes, to kill time.
He reread the data sheets on the planet. It had been colonized three hundred years before. There'd been trouble establishing a human-use ecological system on the planet because the native plants and animals were totally useless to humankind. Native timber could be used in building, but only after drying-out for a period of months. When growing or green it was as much water-saturated as a sponge. There had never been a forest fire here, not even caused by lightning!
There were other oddities. The aboriginal microorganisms here did not attack wastes of introduced terrestrial types. It had been necessary to introduce scavenger organisms from elsewhere. This and other difficulties made it true that only one of the world's five continents were human-occupied. Most of the land surface was strictly as it had been before the landing of men—impenetrable jungles of spongelike flora, dwelt in by a largely unknown useless fauna. Calhoun read on. Population ... government ... health statistics.... He went through the list.
He had time to kill, so he rechecked his course and speed relative to the planet. He and Murgatroyd had dinner. Then he waited until the ship was near enough to report in.
"Med Ship Esclipas Twenty calling ground," he said when the time came. He taped his own voice as he made the call. "Requesting co-ordinates for landing. Our mass is fifty tons. Repeat, five-oh tons. Purpose of landing, planetary health inspection."
He waited while his taped voice repeated and re-repeated the call. An incoming voice said sharply:
"Calling Med Ship! Cut your signal! Do not acknowledge this call! Cut your signal! Instructions will follow. But cut your signal!"
Calhoun blinked. Of all possible responses to a landing call, orders to stop signaling would be least likely. But after an instant he reached over and stopped the transmission of his voice. It happened to end halfway through a syllable.
Silence. Not quite silence, of course, because there was the taped record of background noise which went on all the time the Med Ship was in space. Without it, the utter absence of noise would be sepulchral.