Med Service

Calhoun, the practical, good-humored Med Service doctor, expects a routine inspection when he and his loyal tormal, Murgatroyd, head for the colony world Maris III. Instead, the planet reacts to his arrival with fear, then silence, and a deadly landing-grid trap slams his ship blind and helpless out of the sky. Calhoun fights back with a brilliant burst of overdrive energy, crashes safely enough to survive, and finds himself stranded near an eerily pristine city that seems deserted yet has clearly tried to kill him. As he investigates on foot through an Earthlike but subtly alien landscape, he uncovers a chilling contradiction: a supposedly empty world full of signs of hidden activity, and a population terrorized by a mysterious plague. A dead official, starved beside edible maize Murgatroyd happily devours, pushes Calhoun deeper into the medical mystery. Then a frightened statistician, Helen Jons, reveals the truth: the disease brings listlessness, breathlessness, coma, and death, while outsiders have responded not with treatment but with murder, cutting power and communications and forcing the sick to flee. Outraged, Calhoun turns his medical skill and nerve against both the plague and the cruelty surrounding it, determined to expose the killers and help the dying before Maris III's secret destroys everyone left alive. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.