Med Ship Man

Med Ship officer Calhoun arrives in orbit over Maya on what should be a routine medical inspection, only to find a planet that will not answer. With Murgatroyd, his clever, coffee-loving tormal companion, at his side, he watches an intact world below and senses immediately that the silence is wrong. A nearby liner, the Candida, confirms the unease: after twelve hours in orbit, it too has received no response, even though one of its passengers is desperate to land. Calhoun descends to a city that is eerily deserted—no traffic, no crowds, no panic, only open shops, empty streets, and a faint sour odor. The native ground-cover plants are dying in slimy patches, insects and birds are gone, and the silence feels planned rather than accidental. As he probes deeper, he discovers strange rhythmic power drains from the grid-control system and evidence that the population fled east in orderly fashion, long before he arrived. Driving through the abandoned city with Murgatroyd, Calhoun rescues the parachuting passenger: Arthur Allison, a wealthy and arrogant man carrying a case of interstellar credit. Together they head into the mystery, where Calhoun suspects Maya's crisis is tied to a far more dangerous ecological and planetary emergency than a simple communications failure. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.